When Aimee Lee first traveled to South Korea’s rural mills to study hanji, a traditional handmade paper, she was told she didn’t look “strong enough” for the work. It wasn’t easy for Lee, a young Korean American woman, to gain the hanji makers’ trust. They were suspicious of her as a foreigner, she said, especially considering her unmarried, “super old maid” status. (She was 30.) Despite her interest, they were hesitant to take on an apprentice.
“People say, why didn’t you give up?” Lee said with a laugh during a recent interview in her studio. “And I said, I never thought that was a choice! I went for a reason. They’re right in front of me. It’s just a matter of convincing them.”
The papermakers came around. And ever since, Lee, 48, has dedicated her career to making, documenting and teaching hanji, which is made from the paper mulberry tree. Traditionally, Koreans used it at home as insulation, floor and wall coverings and even for household objects like chamber pots. Now the craft has largely fallen into obscurity, though it is still used in some homes and in contemporary art.
To make it well, Lee said, every step matters. “The plant wants to become paper, and it’s the human’s job to partner with it.”
Making hanji begins during the harvest, in late fall. The inner bark of the young paper mulberry tree yields smooth, silky paper, and the pruning process doesn’t kill the tree, unlike European papermaking, which requires killing the tree to access the cellulose inside it. Lee sources her paper mulberry from Thailand and from a grower she knows in Florida.
She steams the bark to help isolate the plant’s inner, woody core, but if the growth is too old, it doesn’t soften easily. Year-old shoots are best. “Even two years is too old. It’s so tough,” Lee said. “You have to scrape away the outer layers, so then you’ve actually scraped away half your batch.”
She strips away the black and green exterior layers, leaving the inner white bark, which she cooks in a caustic solution that softens it and removes acid.
“The white bark is what you need to make really high-quality paper,” Lee said.
Lee, who now lives in Lyndhurst, Ohio, grew up in Hastings-on-Hudson, N.Y., with her parents who had immigrated from Korea.
“People would ask, ‘Are you Japanese? Are you Chinese?’ If I said no, they were like, ‘Well, there’s no other thing you could be,’” she said of her childhood. “The overwhelming feeling was of shame. The overwhelming desire was for assimilation.”
Lee spent some summers in Korea, and returned at 19 to sharpen her language skills. In graduate school she studied book arts at Columbia College Chicago and was captivated by her first papermaking class — its meditative nature, its use of water and its ability to cultivate peace in the mind and body. She learned about the history of papermaking in China and Japan, but hanji was missing from English-language literature.
“My question was: What happened in Korea, papermaking-wise? That’s when I thought, I have to go there,” she said. She received a Fulbright fellowship in 2008 and another in 2021 to return and study papermakers’ tools. She worked with a tutor to decipher the craft’s specialized vocabulary.
After preparing the fiber, Lee pours it into a vat filled with water and mucilage, a thick, gooey adhesive traditionally made from hibiscus roots. It helps distribute the fibers evenly. Then Lee passes a bamboo screen through the vat, moving it from front to back and then side to side.
She presses the water out of her paper sheets and dries them on her basement wall. Each sheet sits for at least a year so the fibers can settle.
Lee makes traditional Korean dresses with sheaths of various textures. Some dresses feature “bark lace,” bark that has been spread and dried to reveal the plant’s natural lattice pattern. She also makes woven duck figurines. Both have been exhibited in museums. (For her art, she also uses hanji from Korea.)
Making hanji requires living in concert with nature and other people, Lee said. The existence of a single sheet depends on so many things derived from nature: the growth of the paper mulberry, the hibiscus plant that forms the mucilage and even the bamboo screen that she uses to form sheets of paper.
“It was born out of a time when that was second nature, just using what we had,” she said. “The craft only evolves as you innovate, as you use it in the real world.”
The traditional technique Lee uses is on the verge of extinction, she said.
“It’s very possible that those lines are cut, are severed. The children of the paper makers are not learning it,” she said. She wanted to catch hanji “by the tail before it’s totally gone,” and bring it to the United States. “I’m doing what my parents did,” she said. “It’s a migration.”
