Yonzu Lee

Yonzu is a multi-disciplinary designer from South Korea who specializes in Menswear. Her practice has always started with questioning discrimination against women and female bodies.

As a Korean woman, yonzu defines herself as a designer with a perspective on the world that questions discrimination against her status. Inspired by her own experience, her practice is woven with the absurdity and violence of sexual objectification. She always questions social languages that women are expected to meet in terms of material and silhouette, and how these factors marginalize specific groups of people. In addition to garments, she firmly established her perspectives through videos, artifacts, photographs, and textile art. 

In South Korea, where hidden camera crimes against females are prevalent, I always lived with anxiety, even in the unconscious. Despite these crimes being the perpetrator’s fault in dismissing a female body as a sexual object rather than an individual’s body, I have seen countless paranoid women covering every crack and hole in public toilets fearing that it might be a hidden camera; I am no exception. Furthermore, even when the perpetrators get arrested, they do not feel shame as close to the one the victims experience.

I have endeavored to dismantle and reconstruct these unjust power relations in the past year in the MA. In the majority of Asian history, women were forced to wear clothes that conceal themselves, solely because they “belonged” to someone (family or male). Similarly, in France, women wore hats called “Quichenotte: kiss me not” to curb males’ sexual desires during the war. The lace, which has been widely used in European coverings, is a suitable material to manipulate women’s attitudes as it simultaneously reveals and covers their bodies. Such characteristics of this material represent both seduction and tidiness. All of these factors laid the foundation for imposing women’s “desirable” attitudes and roles in society.

As a question of this absurdity, my clothes reinterpret protection from the male gaze and symbolize a self-defense mechanism. The reinterpretation of the lace was influenced by how effectively Lucas and Bourgeois utilized skin-like tactile materials to disclose the problems of female objectification. I have pondered and concluded that to make the perpetrator feel ashamed for his actions, he must physically see his own actions of filming. Inspired by Olafur and Milo’s mirror projects, I have experimented with reflective materials so that the viewer sees oneself with the subject. The solution to the final question of how to shame the perpetrator remains an intriguing section.

I desired to contemplate other dimensions of protection beyond historical garment references. Kingsnorth is known for adding sophisticated-designed cushions on the areas of hard chairs. I interpreted such visual aspects of her works as protection of the human body. Her designs inspired me to develop silhouettes utilizing protective cushions on the body parts – where "protection" is required.