Tools are Only Tools
Nayeon Gu
There are artists who construct entire systems in order to produce their work. Such systems constitute a logical process directed toward the formal completion of an artwork, functioning as a framework that mediates between the artist’s conception and the work’s eventual manifestation. Although these structures are robust systems shaped by the interplay of artistic autonomy and individual disposition, they are not necessarily efficient or productive. Needless to say, the process through which an artwork comes into being stands in direct opposition to the principles of technical Taylorism, which seeks to maximize output quickly and minimize waste. Instead, a single work may emerge only through an immense concentration of labor and an exceptionally slow process. At times, it may even require a “broken machine,” one that incorporates deliberate destruction and frequent errors. If an artwork is produced through such a system and the machinery devised to sustain it, it is grounded not in utility but in transformation and nonutility. In doing so, it generates exceptional conditions that could never be attained through mechanical production alone.
Sooji Lee’s work is produced through what might be called a “broken machine,” a tool constituted by a stubborn and highly idiosyncratic system. While oriented toward transformation and nonutility, it also possesses a distinctly artisanal quality, insofar as the artist creates the very objects that are necessary for the work. As a result, the work encompasses not only the finished artwork itself but also the process through which it is produced, a process that accumulates into a larger system. This system belongs to what might be considered the hidden side of the work, yet the tools of production that occupy this hidden realm at times appear equivalent in significance to the work itself. In Typeface Bodoni Writer (2016), Sooji Lee writes letters using a machine of her own design. To create the ground upon which those letters would appear, the artist subsequently developed Paper Maker (2018). To realize the form of a typeface, a mechanical medium capable of producing it is required; to provide a surface on which that typeface can exist, another tool becomes necessary. We can, of course, write letters on paper without any such machines. Yet for Sooji Lee, only through these machines can the desired forms of letters and paper come into being. Since the invention of Gutenberg’s printing press, typography as a medium has been fundamentally tied to the logics of mass reproduction and production. It is through these structures of production that we ordinarily encounter both type and paper. Sooji Lee, however, creates intensely private machines for type and paper that remain detached from mass production and replication. Through them, the forms and materiality of type and paper become singular modes of expression in their own right. In this sense, the artist’s machines depart from the efficiency and standardization pursued by Fordist modes of mechanical production, transforming the tool itself into an entirely personal form.
These tools often possess a powerful visual presence, and the structural form through which their systems are manifested is so pronounced that they are frequently mistaken for artworks themselves. I first encountered Sooji Lee’s practice at the 2023 Nanji Residency Seoul Museum of Art. Seeing the tools that filled the studio, I naturally assumed they were artworks. Later, when I sat down with the artist as a writer for the first time at Seoul Art Space Geumcheon in 2025, Sooji Lee emphasized that these monumental structures were “only tools.” Hearing this, I began to think of those tools as another form of trace, akin to the way the process of making becomes visibly embedded within the artwork itself. To draw an analogy, the tool functions like a form of dripping. Just as the traces of Jackson Pollock’s dripping accumulate directly on the canvas, these tools materialize and preserve the trajectories of artistic production.
Sooji Lee has also remarked that these tools are “optimized for the body and for knowledge,” and that the tools derived from such conditions do not, in themselves, carry any particular meaning. When the artist presented Four Tools (2023), it was because four tools had been devised for the production of four works. In this sense, the tools both anticipate the works to come and contain their forms in a latent state. Spindle for 100 Strings of Thread produces thread for use in artworks, much as the artist previously developed machines for making paper. Tool for Making a Hollow Hexahedron employs that thread to generate a hollow six-sided form, while Tool for Making a Hollow Cylinder uses the same material to articulate a hollow cylindrical structure. Each tool thus functions as an index of a particular work. Embracing the countless errors that inevitably arise through the artist’s invention, these tools exist in the present as though they were the works’ past tense.
What these tools are oriented toward is the future, and that future propels the work toward its completed state. The form of artwork is already embedded within the tool, while the errors generated throughout the process become necessities that drive the emergence of form. Yet the point at which these errors arise is precisely the artist’s body and actions. The mechanisms through which the tools operate register the artist’s living breath and rhythm, and in doing so give rise to the meaning of making itself. This meaning, however, does not unfold into content. Just as a tool is only a tool, the meaning of making lies in the act of making itself. Just as the artist’s typographic works do not seek to compose specific words, type remains simply type, possessing its own forms, characteristics, and structures. The artist visualizes those forms, characteristics, and structures in a completely individuated state, and within them remains the presence of the person who devised the tools and constructed the system. For this reason, the forms produced through these tools inevitably become, in the artist’s words, “forms of life.”
Accordingly, the tools themselves become forms and systems shaped by the artist’s life. In the 2025 video work How to Make a Regular Hexahedron (working title), three characters appear: the Ruler, the Thinker, and the Glitch. One opens and stacks books, another tears pages from them, and a third places the torn pages back onto the floor and reattaches them. The collisions between compulsive repetition and free deviation embedded in the process of producing artworks through tools, along with the various dilemmas that emerge within that gap, are personified through these characters. Though driven by actions that are simple yet deeply absurd, the video’s narrative takes on an autobiographical dimension through the roles of its characters and the nature of their actions. The artist’s ongoing practice, in which obsession and freedom continually exchange positions within both the tools and the processes of production, invests every stage of the process with meaning: from the awkward, grinding movement of the system to its eventual arrival at a single physical form.
This ultimately leads to a question, and perhaps a conviction: is art not sufficient unto itself as a physical entity? The immediacy of an artwork as a formal and material object differs from the linguistic dimension through which content and concepts are articulated. We continually seek to extract meaning from works of art, a tendency closely tied to the desire to transform the artwork into a signifier. Sooji Lee’s pursuit of a condition without content, and the construction of intricate systems and tools for the production of formal objects, are ultimately directed toward affirming the physical presence of the artwork itself. The meanings that emerge through the interaction between this material reality and its viewers belong to each individual encounter. The artist’s “intention” and “purpose,” however, are realized through the act of making the artwork itself by means of these tools.
Sooji Lee has remarked that “whether sculpture or painting, form is sufficient even as a shell alone.” For example, Resemblance 1 and Resemblance 2 consist of a black cube produced through one of the artist’s tools and a cement cube of identical dimensions, arranged respectively side by side and one above the other. In these works, the black cube exists as a fully autonomous object, detached from the tool, unlike in the artist’s earlier projects. As the outcome of a dialectical practice oscillating between compulsion and freedom through the use of tools, the cube testifies to its own sculptural possibilities. Yet Sooji Lee’s sculpture operates in a manner that resists being subsumed into either concept or content. The relationship between the two rigorously ordered forms likewise realizes a distinctly sculptural condition, free from the impurities of externally imposed meaning.
Positioned alongside these works is Broad One, which serves as a surrogate for the temporality embodied by the tool, revealing the materiality of the black cube as something produced through the artist’s apparatus. Its state, with one corner pulled upward and folded back, exposes the latent material nature embedded within the surfaces of the black cube seen in Resemblance. Meanwhile, the second black plane beneath it, extending slightly beyond the woven surface above, embodies one face of the cement cube from Resemblance. Just as Resemblance approaches our perception through the horizontal and vertical relations established between identical forms made of different materials, Broad One constructs relationships among planes, the fundamental elements of three-dimensional form, prompting viewers to infer the processes that unfold between tool and materiality.
Once an artwork becomes situated within an institutional framework, it inevitably attracts layers of supplementary interpretation. At times, the very grounds for an artwork’s existence are treated as equivalent to the persuasiveness of its meaning. Yet the creative impulse once described as kunstwollen arises from an expressive drive that recognizes the limits of language and signs. To translate the force of that impulse into language only creates a loop that leads back to those same limitations. What Sooji Lee refers to as a “shell” is grounded in a trust in the operation of form itself. And when the tools and acts of making that enable such forms function as both practical necessities and artistic foundations, it becomes possible to sense both the justification and the liberation inherent in the artist’s practice.
Nayeon Gu (Art Critic, Researcher)
Nayeon Gu is an art critic specializing in contemporary Korean art and a researcher of the post-war Japanese art. Since 2022, she has been operating SPACE ÆFTER where she plans exhibitions and publications. She authored The Art of Drifting (ZININZIN, 2017), and translated Tokyo Beta (ZININZIN, 2018). She co-edited Yum Ji Hye, The Last Night (PPP, 2024), and curated exhibitions such as Wild Matter (SPACE ÆFTER, 2022) and NO Geography (SPACE ÆFTER, 2023).
