Jae Ko, Maryland: The Artist Who Turned a Roll of Cash Register Tape Into a Career

She works alone on an island, feeding rolls of paper onto a wheel the way a potter would work clay, decades of instinct deciding how tight or loose a single roll needs to be before it becomes something else entirely. Shweta of Style Essentials speaks with Jae Ko, ahead of Striated, her debut solo exhibition in Belgium, about the classroom assignment that became a career, the trees and glaciers that reshaped her sense of form, and why she'd rather leave a work unexplained than tell you what to feel.

Jae Ko's earliest education wasn't in sculpture at all. She trained at Toyo Art School in Tokyo through the early 1980s in commercial design, packaging, hand lettering, illustration, and book layout, work that paid but rarely asked the questions she actually wanted answered. Four years of that was enough, and she moved to Wako University for a fine art degree instead, chasing something she calls simply more intriguing and more attractive than solving other people's design problems. Even then, paper hadn't left her. Through her twenties she built floor-to-ceiling installations from stacked rice paper and twenty-by-fifty-inch sheets and experimented with heated acrylic plates bent into wave shapes to print on the same material, work that survives now only in old photographs.

Asked when she first knew paper was her material, she resists the idea of a single turning point, describing it instead as something closer to a drift than a decision. "There was no single moment I knew paper was my material," she explains. "It was a slow transition from a sheet to draw-on to the creation of a form." That gradual shift found its clearest expression a decade later, in 1996, partway through her MFA at the Maryland Institute College of Art, when a class assignment on circles sent her into a shop for a roll of adding machine tape, ordinary cash register paper, mostly because it was already a perfect circle and cost almost nothing. She slit the roll open with a knife and dropped it into a pool of ink and water, watching how the shape held or failed under that pressure, then started unrolling it by hand and winding it back up looser than before, over and over, learning through repetition exactly how much tension a roll could carry before its character changed completely. She still calls that, plainly, her aha moment.

Those years between finishing at Wako in 1988 and completing her MFA in 1998 weren't formal training at all, and she's matter-of-fact about what they taught her instead: less about technique, more about survival. "I have learned about those things I had to give up and how difficult it is to survive being an artist," she reflects. Early wall pieces from that period were dyed first with natural pigments, saffron and indigo, before she settled into watercolor. Joseph Beuys comes up as a reference point when she talks about that time, not for the material he used but for what it carried, and she draws a careful distinction between the two: where felt held the weight of Beuys's own postwar history, rolled paper for her carries something older and more communal, tied to centuries of paper's place in Korean, Chinese, and Japanese craft. By the early 2000s, flat work had started to feel like a boundary she no longer needed to respect. She wanted to see all the sides of a piece, a hunger for dimension she traces partly to the Bristlecone Pine, a species that survives past four thousand years, bent and twisted by wind into forms that endure the punishment rather than break under it.

The connection between her two core materials runs deeper than most people notice on first look. Sumi ink comes from burned wood, and paper comes from trees, so the two share an origin before they ever meet on her worktable. Put that observation to her directly, though, and she waves off any suggestion of a deliberate concept behind it. "My core inspirations come from nature, so it all fits," is as far as she'll take the thought, treating the overlap less like a clever idea worth unpacking and more like something that was bound to be true from the start.

Her studio process today still runs closer to an industrial workshop than a conventional sculpture practice. Tightly bound rolls of tape get fed onto a spindle mounted to what is essentially a pottery wheel, sometimes paired with a second, manually operated turntable running alongside it, and as the wheel spins, the paper reloads itself looser than it started, built up roll after roll until it reaches two or three feet across. From there she bends and twists the mass by hand into shape, soaks it in water carrying sumi ink as colorant, and lets paper's own tendency to swell under moisture do part of the sculpting, an effect she compares, almost fondly, to the childhood trick of dropping a paper straw into water and watching it curl. Once a shape holds, she seals the back in glue and pulp and leaves it to dry for weeks or months, slowly enough that it stays rigid once mounted, at which point she can turn it over and saturate the surface with further color. Her palette runs conservative by instinct, an ultramarine blue she keeps returning to after years mixing water-based inks shipped over from Korea, or, just as often, the raw white of unaltered paper, chosen because it holds the shadow systems she builds into a piece, the gaps between rolls and folds carrying as much of the work as the paper itself.

Larger installations are governed by an entirely separate discipline. Ko builds a precise scale model of a space first, then orders paper and controls its looseness to match what the model already told her would work. Force of Nature, her 2011 installation at The Phillips Collection, used hundreds of earth-toned kraft paper rolls that kept settling and shifting under their own weight for the full run of the show, changing the way an actual landscape does, gravity finishing part of the composition after she'd finished her own. The same logic carried into Shiro and Escalante at Grounds For Sculpture in 2015, built from white recycled paper this time, and later into Flow at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, where she drew on ice formations near her own home to hold something cold against a Houston summer that runs steamy from June through September. Pressed on exactly when a piece stops being a sculpture and becomes something larger, her answer comes without hesitation: "They only become environments when they leave the wall."

Her sources have widened well beyond that one landscape over the years, pulling from repeated trips through the canyons and stratified rock of Utah, Colorado, and New Mexico, and later from Newfoundland, Labrador, and Alaska, where glaciers left as deep a mark on her as anything in the American desert had. Asked how three very different cultures, Korean, Japanese, and American, quietly shape how she sees form, she frames it as an advantage rather than a tension to resolve. "The things I have learned from one culture I can apply to the next," she notes. "I can combine the vast American landscape with the more urban Japanese or Korean. "She's just as careful not to let any of it read as environmental advocacy dressed up as art, positioning herself less as an activist and more as someone presenting landscapes already reinterpreted and enhanced through her own hand.

That instinct toward restraint runs through how she talks about control itself. Asked how much of her process is deliberate and how much is letting the material do what it wants, she doesn't hesitate: accidents are part of how she works, and a piece that came out exactly as planned would have taught her nothing worth learning. The same philosophy carries into how she thinks about the tensions running through her own practice, caught between East and West, writing and sculpture, and the organic and the architectural. Rather than resolve any of it, she'd rather sit inside the friction. "Geological forces and tensions are the point," is how she puts it, not something to smooth over on the way to a tidier statement. Nor is she plugged into whatever's trending, online or otherwise. Working alone in a studio on an island, she describes herself as unmoved by popular media culture, digital or otherwise, artificial intelligence included, shaped instead by the ocean outside her window, the glaciers she's seen firsthand, and the stratification she studies in landforms, natural media rather than the manufactured kind.

That reluctance to over-explain carries straight into Striated, opening this October at 22MUSE in Antwerp, her first solo exhibition in Belgium, running from 23rd October through 28th November 2026. The title borrows its meaning from geology, thin parallel grooves and layered strata built up over time, and mirrors the slow, accumulated logic of her own process closely enough that it barely needed translating for the show. She won't predict how visitors will feel walking into the room, pointing out that she's never worked inside that particular gallery before and that every space pulls something different out of the same material once she's standing inside it.

That same unsentimental streak runs through nearly everything she says about the shape of her career so far. Two grants landed at very different moments, the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant in 2002 and the Anonymous Was A Woman Award a decade later, and she talks about both without any of the reverence you might expect. One covered her studio bills. The other simply moved things forward. It's the same practicality she brings to the pieces that leave her altogether, work that now sits permanently in the Hirshhorn or The Phillips Collection. She doesn't think about them much once they're gone, she says, mostly because she trusts they've landed somewhere they're meant to be. Even a question aimed at her insecurities gets turned gently aside. Asked what unfinished work keeps her up at night, she brushes the premise off entirely. "Not sure how to answer this question," she says, "but I sleep well."

And when asked what architects and designers might see in her sculptures that a purely art-world audience wouldn't, she doesn't offer a theory to fill the silence. She's simply interested, she says, in whatever conversation unfolds between herself and whoever happens to be standing in front of the piece.

Ask her to imagine designing a building instead, and she doesn't pause to consider it. "I don't build buildings," she says. "I built sculptures." It isn't a rejection so much as a boundary she's never felt the need to test, the difference between something people move through and something they simply stand in front of. Buildings ask to be lived in. What she makes asks only to be looked at, sat with, returned to, and left to mean whatever it means to whoever's standing there that day.

It's a fitting place to leave her, given how the whole conversation started, with a roll of cash register tape bought for a few cents because it happened to already be a perfect circle. Thirty years on, the material hasn't changed nearly as much as what she's learned to do with it: unroll it, wet it, twist it, and let it dry into something with weight and shadow and its own quiet argument for what paper was always capable of becoming. Striated will be the latest test of that instinct in a room she's never stood in, with visitors she can't predict. She seems entirely at ease not knowing how it lands.

More on Jae Ko's exhibition Striated is available through 22MUSE.