When a Pittsburgh gallery representative asked Ed Bing Lee if he could create a teapot for an upcoming exhibition he thought, “of course, that’s child’s play.” Then his imagination went to work. “I like the idea of taking an art form that already exists and then reinterpreting it,” Lee says. “I knew I could do a regular teapot, but if you look at something and it leads you to something else, that’s what I like.” Leafing through reproductions of “Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji,” by the Japanese printmaker Katsushika Hokusai, Lee found a favorite, “The Great Wave off Kanagawa,” created during the 1820s. Lee envisioned the great wave washing up over the top of the teapot and a fully-occupied fishing boat projecting underneath as the spout. Four and a half months and countless knots later, Lee completed the 8”x 8”x 8” teapot (see the video story, below).fine arts magazine

Ed Bing Lee’s parents immigrated to San Francisco, where the artist was born, from Canton, China, at the beginning of the 1920s. In the fourth grade Lee had a teacher with a particular interest in art notice his drawing ability and she continued to encourage him to draw throughout his high school years. He won a scholarship to the Rudolph Schaeffer School of Design in San Francisco, and later received a bachelor’s degree from San Francisco State College, where one of his part-time jobs involved model-making. “I loved the idea of constructing stuff,” he says. Because he wanted to further his art studies and live in New York, Lee enrolled in Brooklyn College, receiving a master’s degree in painting and graphics. A classmate, who was a director of Boris Knoll fabrics, urged him to join their studio, which he did for several years. Later, he became head of the design department at Craftex Mills, near Philadelphia. His expertise in the textile market led to teaching posts at the University of the Arts and Moore College of Art, both in Philadelphia. And his teaching led to a class in off-loom techniques and to Lee’s discovery of knotting. “I thought of all the off-loom techniques, this was the most direct. It had the greatest freedom,” Lee says. “You can go two-dimensional, three-dimensional, or you can do both at the same time. And there’s no machinery.” That’s important. No machinery. Ed Bing Lee is strictly hands-on.

At the University of Pennsylvania, he studied art history, obtaining a second master’s degree, and he started using his favorite paintings to inspire his work. He thought how like pointillism his knots were and he began creating two-dimensional pieces that incorporated segments of George Seurat’s “A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte”. But just reproducing parts of the painting would be boring. What would today’s picnickers take to the park? Fast food, of course. So Lee introduced images of sundaes, hamburgers, and Coca-Cola containers to his interpretations of Seurat’s work. In later two-dimensional pieces he chose Vermeer, Gauguin and others to inform his designs. Inevitably, he began experimenting with three-dimensional works. Visits to various natural history museums inspired a series on the earth crust, on minerals and rocks, and on exquisite orchids. Lee creates his pieces by axial weaving, by rotating them as he works. Using the double half-hitch knot, which he sometimes ties vertically, and other times horizontally, depending on the texture he wants to achieve, he works with DMC embroidery floss, Belgian linen and synthetic ribbons. His pieces seldom contain any form of support. For the most part, his work is hollow. The tension in the knots creates the shape. Viewers of his art frequently ask how many knots are in a piece. In the flat, two-dimensional works, it’s approximately five hundred per square inch. In the three-dimensional ones, well, you’ll just have to count them.

An admirer of two California artists, watercolorist Mark Adams, and Wayne Thiebaud, best known for his brightly-colored pies, cakes and other foodstuffs, their work inspired Lee to begin his “Delectables” series. He created assorted pies, ice cream cones, popcorn stuffed in a container covered in the American flag, a hot dog on a bun, and one of everybody’s favorites, a hamburger with all the fixin’s. Amazingly, the tomato on the hamburger was made by knotting single-ply embroidery thread. Lee likes to work with pieces in a series. “If you do only one piece, you have no idea of its possibilities,” he says. “I always find if a work doesn’t lead your mind to expand, you’re at a dead end. Each time I pick an idea and it doesn’t go far enough, I abandon it. I always want to work on something that will make me think, make me want to do the work, to find the solution. Challenge moves my work forward.”

Challenge brought him to one of his most recent series which he named “Meditation on the Chawan.” Chawans are bowls, usually antique, used for mixing matcha, a powered green tea used in the Japanese tea ceremony. Lee chose the chawan because he wanted to train himself to think differently, to complete a structure that wasn’t totally enclosed, but still had body and volume. He moved from using waxed linen, which is very strong and structural, to ribbons, paper, even shoe laces. “Moving into ribbons, which have no body whatsoever, I wanted to still achieve volume just by the technique of knotting,” Lee says. “Just thinking about structure that way, with this floppy material, gave me the confidence that I can do certain things just by imagination and by thinking it through. And I sought to explore the concept of unity in variety. I wanted the series to be an open-ended adventure.” In 18 months, he completed 40 chawans (all approximately 4”x 4”x 4”), experimenting with different knotting techniques in addition to new materials.

He compares the experience to going back to school and says without it the cranes probably never would have materialized. Displayed in Lee’s studio is a fold-out greeting card depicting an elegant illustration of cranes. He always enjoyed looking at it, but only Ed Bing Lee would look at it and envision a teapot. But if you can turn “The Great Wave off Kanagawa” into a teapot, why not three cranes? And there’s the series thing. One teapot does not explore enough possibilities. The cranes teapot (12”x10”x10”) took Lee three and a half months to complete, and he has other ideas for teapots under development. In addition to his teapots, he wants to explore something different based on a favorite jungle scene by Henri Rousseau. “It’s always been one of my favorite paintings – charming, imaginative, a flight of fancy,” Lee says. “It’s a real challenge to my imagination.” He also wants to work on other designs that allow him to borrow the geometric, soaring arcs of Frank Stella’s work.

A recipient of numerous awards, including the 2007 Pew Fellowship in the Arts, awarded annually to 12 outstanding Philadelphia-area artists, Lee’s work is in numerous private collections, and regularly shown throughout the U.S. and at Philadelphia’s Snyderman-Works Gallery, where his art has been represented for over 30 years. At 77, Lee continues to create from fully-formed images in his mind. Often he will work on three or more pieces simultaneously, occasionally stopping to make sketches on scraps of paper or to record random thoughts in a notebook about a work as it progresses. His studio, high above the Philadelphia skyline, is lined with meticulously-organized threads, his collection of art books, and examples of work from throughout his career. Working at a small table, he does what he most values – challenge his imagination with endless exploration, one knot at a time.

By Kathleen McCann, Contributing Writer

Kathleen McCann writes about the visual arts from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Watch master, Ed Bing Lee working in his studio at: