K-ART FOCUS Lee Ye-eun finds meaning and life in ordinary objects

A rice bowl, a pair of scissors and a notebook with vehicle numbers might seem ordinary. In Lee Ye-eun’s photographs, however, they became the faces of a border village between the two Koreas.

Her outdoor exhibition, “People of Baegyeon-ri,” presented as part of “DMZ Open Exhibition: Staging,” brings together belongings lent by residents of a village in Paju, Gyeonggi Province. Also known as Tongil-chon, or Unification Village, Baegyeon-ri lies just south of the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ), within a military-controlled area where civilian access is restricted.

Established in 1973 to showcase South Korean agriculture to the North, the village is defined by its unusual geopolitical position. But Lee wanted to look beyond that distinction to the people who live and work there — growing crops, preparing meals and tending flowers.

“Tongil-chon sounds like somewhere very special, but Baegyeon-ri sounds like a village you might find anywhere,” she said in a recent interview with The Korea Times. “These aren’t extraordinary people. They’re ordinary people working hard to make a life here.”

For about a month, Lee walked through the village, asking residents to lend objects that meant something to them. She promised to return the items after photographing them.

The village administrator, who juggled between operating a forklift, guiding visitors and managing the village museum for a living, contributed a notebook filled with vehicle numbers. A woman working at a restaurant supplied a rice bowl, an everyday vessel of their labor. A farmer handed over his scissors.

Lee arranged the objects into precarious towers in an open, grassy space, photographing them against the village landscape. “When I look at these pictures, I think of those people,” she said.

Finding balance and comfort

Lee’s tower project began during the COVID-19 pandemic, when she wondered whether a single photograph could offer comfort.

Looking around her home, she realized her treasured possessions were not expensive objects but containers of memories: stones collected with friends, movie tickets and small festival souvenirs.

Traditional stone wishing towers encountered on village walks suggested a form.

“A stone lying on the ground is nothing special on its own. But when someone stacks it with a wish on top of other stones, it becomes a wishing tower,” she said. “It might not actually grant the wish, but the feeling behind it seemed so tender.”

She began borrowing objects that had comforted others and built wishing towers of her own.

An old lady in her neighborhood offered a hoe, declaring she could do anything with it. Marriage migrants from Vietnam and Nepal contributed a shuttlecock, a reminder of evenings playing badminton after difficult days. Another woman lent the small stones she used to play with her grandmother — a game that helped them connect despite their quarrels.

The objects differed, but each carried a personal history. By stacking them, Lee sought to give those memories a physical form — one that could be shared and remembered.

Father as inspiration

Her interest in preserving such stories through photography came from her father.

One day, Lee was driving her father home after they had shared a meal. When a song about sewing machines came on the radio, he began talking about his childhood, when he had left home for Seoul to work before finishing middle school.

He had worked at a banner-making shop, sleeping beneath a worktable as machines rattled overhead. Instead of being annoyed by the noise, "he called the noise a lullaby."

"He was grateful to have somewhere to sleep," Lee recalled.

The story changed how Lee understood her father who also encouraged her to pursue photography.

She knew the story well, but one day while working in a factory herself and talking with co-workers about what it meant to earn a living, she heard something different.

“For the first time in my life, I think I heard that story not as a daughter listening to her father, but as one worker listening to another,” she said. “It broke my heart to think that a person’s entire history might end as something told to his daughter over a dinner drink.”

She felt compelled to preserve his story. The encounter also helped shape her approach to documenting the experiences of people whose lives might otherwise go unrecorded.

Keep things precarious

To build her towers, Lee uses no adhesive. These are precarious belongings, however ordinary they look, she said.

Some towers take hours to make. Others resist for months, she said. The camera is ready before the construction begins. Once the objects stand after countless falls, she retreats carefully to capture the moment.

What matters is not an elegant silhouette but finding an arrangement that holds.

“The same object can stand or fall depending on what is above and below it,” she said. “That feels so much like relationships. The same person sometimes makes you feel discouraged and fall apart, but that person can also help you stand upright.”

Her life as a photographer is as precarious as the towers she built.

Living in a small village in Icheon, Gyeonggi Province, she has developed her art during years of factory and warehouse work. Those workplaces are not simply a means of earning a living, but where she forms relationships and encounters the stories that become part of her photographs. During graduate school, she juggled an assistantship role, classes and night shifts, accepting art projects even when she lacked time and energy.

Even now, she continues to work in warehouses, taking photography assignments and helping install exhibitions to earn a living.

Workers and her own family

That led her to pay attention to labor, frequently featuring objects from workers near her in her photography.

Lee built a tower from cleaning workers’ spray bottle and rubber gloves alongside exhibition installation supplies, bringing into view the people whose labor keeps the galleries running. At the National Museum of Korean Democracy, objects associated with democratic struggle formed another tower: a process of building, collapsing and rebuilding.

Lee also made a tower with objects from her own family. The photographer used a drawer from her mother’s wedding gift furniture, her father’s locked case of children’s letters and certificates, a family Bible, the jacket her younger brother wears when he works at a factory and yut sticks, which her family uses for a traditional game they play a lot during holidays.

Another key item was her mother’s pillowcase. As a child, when her overwhelmed mother left home for days, she held it, breathing in her scent and waiting for her return.

“Our family is such a mess,” she said, laughing. “It’s amazing that we’re still holding together.”

She said she never knows the tower’s final shape beforehand.

“Even if it isn’t impressive, I love it as it is,” she said.