LIFESTYLE

How One Hairstylist Is Reimagining a 2000-Year-Old Korean Art Form

On a cool January morning, a model sits beneath a Korean pine tree in the northwest of Seoul, the gravity-defying lengths of her hair mimicking the uneven growth of branches above her head. On either side, embellishing those rolling waves, are two mother-of-pearl inlay intricately cut to show the soaring herons and flowers often seen in old paintings. Any Seoul-based creative will instantly recognize the work as belonging to Gabe Sin, the incredible and iconoclastic hair designer best known for drawing references from Korean history and culture and transforming them into whimsical wearable pieces. “I have a lot of interest in old Korean art,” he says. “I try to express the most Korean things.”

Gabe Sin. 

Photographed by Peter Ash Lee

Born in Seoul in the 1980s, Sin has always been based in the capital city and maintains a small studio in Itaewon, where he spends hours dreaming up and crafting his show-stopping hair sculptures. Naturally, the room is filled with extensions and wigs, but also flowers, boxes of starch (used to firm up the hair), jugs of resin (to preserve the pieces), and countless trinkets he gathers on meandering walks around Seoul’s sprawling wholesale markets.

Of course, there is plenty of pearl, which Sin sources from jagae (mother of pearl) craft shops around the city. Each jagae hair piece takes him about one week and is painstaking to make. His work nods to the 2000-year-old craft technique called najeonchilgi, in which mother of pearl is inlaid onto decorative boxes, cabinets, or other objets d’art scattered about the home. Growing up, Sin’s grandmother’s house was filled with these pieces; thus, it holds personal meaning. “It’s a work that began from a place of familiarity or longing,” he explains. “I started from the idea that what felt sentimental to me would feel the same to others.”

Here, Sin shares a quintet of stunning hair pieces while expanding on his path to sculpture and the power of finding beauty in familiar things.

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