490 small and 49 large bowls are exhibited in the lower-storey room of the Europe–Far East Gallery. The building’s space has enchanted the artist with its simple and tranquil forms, providing a perfect background for the objects on display. Despite the considerable quantity of the exhibited objects, each bowl grabs attention independently with its distinctive details, opening our eyes to the infinite diversity of form.

During the long months of time-consuming work, the artist created every vessel in accordance with the traditional rules of the ceramic craft. The vessels appear timeless in their pure, simple form. Each bowl, though delicate and fragile, is a promise of durability. Each of them is unique, characterized by its own colours and patterns, with nearly transparent glazing. The smudges created by the firing process endow them with individualized appearance. Young-Jae Lee uses the imperfections of surface deliberately to evoke a sense of roughness. The vessels pick up the interplay of light and shadow conditioned by the surrounding architecture and intensify it. The bowls catch the light that is diffracted on their dome-like shapes and projects the reflexes into the chalices, casting innumerable shadows around. They invite the visitors to pause for a moment and let their eyes follow the nearly infinite number of seemingly familiar everyday objects. They force a viewer to change their perspective: you look at them from above, then you kneel to send a glance between the shining vessels. Just as the bowls, with their grooves, undulations, lines and transitions from one colour to another, evoke an association of landscapes, so does the installation of vessels on the floor form a poetic scenery.

This form of bowls has been known to man from the earliest of times. Each of them is a craft product, handmade and therefore unique. They bear the traces of their creator’s hand and the creative processes on the pottery wheel and in the kiln. Other than by colour, thy differ in form, size, and outline. Each combines the artist’s experience and vision. Her experience is based on the ancient handicraft tradition, and the artist has gained it by making countless vessels. Although the flattened bowls in this group, with diameters of over half a metre, are quite big, the artist is able to work them on the pottery wheel herself.

It was music that inspired Young-Jae Lee to create this bowl form. She drew inspiration from Olivier Messiaen’s ‘Quatuor pour la fin du temps’ (‘Quartet for the End of Time’). The French composer completed the piece in 1941, as a prisoner of a German concentration camp, exploring in his work the motif of Saint John’s Apocalypse.

Korean artist, living and working in Germany for the past forty years. Born in Seoul, South Korea, she was trained in ceramics there, and continued her education in Germany, where she moved in 1972. After completing her art studies in Wiesbaden, she set up her first ceramic workshop while studying art history at the University of Heidelberg. Over the following three years she taught at the Gesamthochschule in Kassel. Since 1987 she has headed the Keramische Werkstatt Margaretenhöhe in Essen.

Young-Jae Lee has been developing Margaretenhöhe’s programme as its designer, technologist, and manager. The workshop’s philosophy is derived from the tradition of the Bauhaus. Its products have gained considerable recognition at design fairs, winning numerous awards, and the collections of vessels by its ceramic workers have been exhibited at handicraft fairs and applied arts galleries in Germany and other European countries. Young-Jae Lee’s works have also been shown in Japan and South Korea.

This success would not have been possible without Young-Jae Lee’s personality, talent, hard work and passion, pronouncedly manifested in her works, in her artistic ceramic vessels. The artist has received such awards as the Bampi-Preis (1981) or the Bayerischer Staatspreis, and her works are included in a number of museum and other collections all over the world. The exhibition at the Manggha Museum is one of the events held in connection with the conferment of an honorary doctorate on the artist by the Eugeniusz Geppert Academy of Fine Arts in Wrocław.