Suzy Lee: Illustrator – Republic of Korea

If you can hear something, it’s just the sounds of waves and seagulls and the voice of the inner child of your mind splashing in the sea. Every detail of the story comes from your mind, not from outside. The author starts the story, but it’s you who fill the gap and complete the story.

S. Lee

travelling across the soft borders between fantasy and reality invests reading with a distinctive pleasure, and it is also the adventure from which many stories are told. Suzy Lee’s illustrations and wordless picture books carry her readers into imaginative worlds made possible by curious little girls, animated shadows with a mind of their own, and rabbits out for revenge. Often working with a limited color palate but in evocative materials such as charcoal and watercolor, Lee uses the physical form of the book itself as a material landscape that enables unexpected encounters between its pages and along its folds.

Lee was born in Seoul in 1974, and enjoyed drawing from a very early age. She credits her encounters as a child with an eccentric local artist in his studio as influencing her decision to become an artist. These memories would later inhabit her book My Bright Atelier (2008). Lee studied painting at Seoul National University, but she turned to books as an artistic specialism during an MA in Book Arts at Camberwell College of Arts in London. Her earliest solo book from 2002 returned to the classic story of Alice in Wonderland, using a monochrome montage technique that combined drawing with photography and fragments of Western artworks to produce uncanny and theatrical scenes of make believe.

Lee makes her books with all kinds of readers in mind, seeing the picture book as a space of interpretive possibility that both children and adults can enjoy. This is particularly the case with her Border trilogy of rectangular shaped books called Mirror (2003), Wave (2008), and Shadow (2010). In each, a young girl follows her curiosity to find company for her playtime—in the shadows of the house when the lights go out, on the beach by the water’s edge, and looking at her own reflection. By literally crossing the central gutter (or fold) of the book, the characters find another way to experience their solitude, and their vivid imaginations unfold by turn of the page in ways that are unexpected. Lee describes her own work as mysterious and sometimes a little strange but always focused on crafting a reading experience that is possible because it “takes the form of the book.”