Profile | ‘Who were the real voices of Manchester?’

She was the youngest curator ever hired at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Seoul, South Korea, and one of the first non-white curators to be employed at any of the Tate galleries across the UK, but despite these achievements, Sook-Kyung Lee comes across as hard-working and humble.

She started her role as the director of the Whitworth art gallery, Manchester, in August 2023 following Alistair Hudson’s departure six months prior.

“I’m trying to understand the building, the people and the collection here,” says Lee. “We have about 70 staff across curatorial, collections, education, civic engagement, visitor experience, development, communications, operations and commercial, but the ethos we all share is being very, very clear about the social impact of the gallery. I think that’s a bit of a cultural thing for the city.”

Sook-Kyung Lee

Growing up in Seoul, South Korea, Sook-Kyung Lee completed her BA and MA, both in art history and theory, at Hongik University in the city.

She started a role as a curator at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul, in 1993, staying there for five years until she decided to take a second MA and move to the UK for the art criticism course at City, University of London.

She then took a PhD in art history and theory at the University of Essex, while also finding work as a freelance curator. Lee became a curatorial fellow for Arts Council East in Cambridge before becoming a curator at Tate Liverpool in 2007.

In 2012, she was appointed senior curator at Tate Modern, where she helped set up the Asia Pacific Research Centre, which developed into her founding the Tate Research Centre: Transnational in 2019.

In the last two years of her 16-year tenure at Tate, she took up the freelance role of artistic director for the Gwangju Biennale, South Korea, which she worked on from 2021 to 2023.

She was appointed director of the Whitworth art gallery in August 2023. She has also become honorary professor of transcultural curating for the University of Manchester.

The heart of Manchester

The Whitworth was founded in 1889 in memory of the industrialist Joseph Whitworth, for “the perpetual gratification of the people of Manchester”, a rationale the gallery still holds today.

“The city of Manchester has a very strong sense of social justice,” says Lee. “I think part of that has arisen from workers in the city being one of the first group of people who rejected the enslavement of people in the United States [which abolished slavery later than the UK] and supported Abraham Lincoln in pursuing its abolition.”

Manchester was also home to the suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst, who led the Votes for Women campaign in the early 20th century.

“Women’s rights and feminism are a very strong legacy that the city holds,” says Lee. “And that has extended to include LGBTQ+ and ethnic minority people claiming their cultures, histories and traditions as part of the city.”

Lee came to the UK in her 20s from Seoul in South Korea, where she grew up. After finishing her BA and MA at Hongik University, she got a job as a curator at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Seoul, becoming the youngest person ever to have been hired in that role.

After a few years at the gallery, which she describes as somewhat “hierarchical”, she decided to do a PhD at the University of Essex. During her studies she also did some freelance curating, which led to her becoming a curatorial fellow for Arts Council East, based in Cambridge.

“I did a project with the King’s Lynn Arts Centre in Norfolk, where we ran an offsite exhibition of contemporary art at the National Trust-run 15th-century Oxburgh Hall,” says Lee. “I think I was just supposed to do one show that year, but I did nine.”

That level of drive is a regular theme in Lee’s career in the arts. In 2007, she joined Tate Liverpool as a curator.

“Becoming a curator at Tate Liverpool gave me a really interesting perspective, because I was previously at the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Korea, which is sort of equivalent to Tate in that it holds a national collection of modern and contemporary art. And both galleries have a wide remit of presenting national but also international exhibitions to the wider audience.”

Cultural exchange

It was Lee's transnational approach to art and art history that propelled her forward. She moved to Tate Modern in London in 2012 to help the organisation set up its Asia Pacific Research Centre. The organisation was taking steps to internationalise its collection, having started with Latin America, then Asia Pacific.

“I wasn’t appointed as an Asian art specialist, but obviously I knew more about Asian art – especially the contemporary practices – through what I knew as a Korean curator,” says Lee. “So, I became deeply involved in researching and acquiring works from the region.”

She says that her first couple of years there were largely focused on setting up the research centre, which in turn helped develop displays at Tate Modern. However, alongside the Asia Pacific research, there were other acquisition committees developing and buying simultaneously, concentrating on lots of other regions across the world.

“Each committee had a specialist curator, but the problem was that it became quite siloed,” she says.

“For instance, while acquiring, let’s say, a piece of African art, you wouldn’t necessarily think about other global developments in similar context. But Tate was showing these works next to each other without necessarily articulating whether they had real juxtapositions or parallels. They could only suggest links.”

Lee was curating major exhibitions at Tate, while also running research into acquisitions, when the penny dropped and she saw that all this siloed working meant broader connections were being missed in the cross-continental history of art.

“Were all these works from across the world actually talking to each other or not? So, I suggested setting up the Tate Research Centre: Transnational to think about these connections, which came to fruition in 2019,” she says.

“It helped Tate Modern define international in a new way. It was the beginning of something else in art, art history and curation. And I think that methodology made a huge impact on other institutions. Now you see these narratives at Moma and the Guggenheim.”

She cites one of her defining moments as the exhibition of 20th-century video and performance artist Nam Jun Paik, who was born in South Korea, that she curated for Tate Modern in 2019.

“I was fascinated how no one knew about him over here, while he was such a national hero in South Korea. I was also surprised that Tate’s collection didn’t have any of his work,” says Lee.

“He had a show in the UK while he was alive, but he was little-known and it got me thinking about how the mainstream artistic narrative excluded people like him from different cultures and countries – easily ignored by mainstream art critics and not really appearing in any textbooks.”

Culmination point

Having noticed throughout her studies that there were rarely any women artists mentioned in textbooks, let alone from other cultures or countries, she began to interrogate what her raison d'être was in terms of her career.

“I was already beginning to get interested in rebalancing art historical narratives, and how to represent these non-western voices and artistic traditions,” says Lee. “It’s become a huge personal passion for me.”

Towards the end of her time at Tate, she decided she could squeeze in just that little bit more. In 2021, she was appointed artistic director of South Korea’s 14th Gwangju Biennale, which opened in April 2023.

“It was quite a baptism, and the work was taking place during the Covid lockdowns. I invited 79 artists with 40 new commissions. It was an intense period of working with living artists,” says Lee. “I did that alongside my full-time work at Tate, which was a challenge, but it was very productive.”

She says that working on the Gwangju Biennale gave her a much bigger, wider scope curatorially, but also says, with a rare giggle: “I must say those one-and-a-half years were very, very intense and yes, I had no weekends.”

So what will Lee, who is obviously extremely committed and hard-working, bring to the Whitworth?

“I am working on an international collaboration for an exhibition in 2025, which should coincide with the Manchester International Festival,” says Lee.

Connecting to the world

But what she is even more excited about is an institutional restructure – “with no redundancies” – across her organisation.

“I’d like the teams to be better structured so that they’re more open to partnership working and international programmes, with a capability to run international tours of our collection, which I’m working on with institutions in Japan and Singapore,” she says.

“But I also want to relook at Manchester’s old industrial and colonial histories and rebalance them here. Where are the people? Who were the real voices of Manchester? I’d like to create more balance with multi-layered stories so that anyone can relate to what is in our gallery.”

It is this cultural exchange that sits at the heart of Lee’s practice, but it also forms the centre of the socially impactful city of Manchester.

“As a hybrid cultural person, swapping of places and perspectives is deeply interesting,” she says. “My ambition is for Manchester to be more globally connected by giving more opportunities for the people here to rethink their own histories.”

The Whitworth

The Whitworth was founded in 1889 in memory of the industrialist Joseph Whitworth, for “the perpetual gratification of the people of Manchester” and is overseen by the University of Manchester.

In 2015, the gallery undertook a £17m redevelopment by architect Muma, which doubled the public space, creating new facilities to house the collection of more than 65,000 works of art, textiles and wallpaper.

Along with expanded gallery spaces, a study centre, learning studio and collections care centre, the gallery reconnected its park with communal gardens and outdoor programmes.

The gallery is driven by a mission to work with communities to use art for positive social change, and actively tries to address what matters most in people’s lives.

It is currently showing the first major retrospective exhibition of Caribbean British artist and poet John Lyons, on until 25 August.