By Srishti Prabha
In a garage studio, dak — Korean paper mulberry — branches dry like laundry. Handmade sheets stack under presses. A tarped Vandercook letterpress waits for a deep clean, and trays of metal type wait for anyone who remembers how to set them. Out back: a vat, bamboo screens, buckets and bark.
This is where the work happens. Not just the art, but the biology that feeds it.
The ecosystem is a product of Korean American artist and educator Steph Rue, who makes handmade paper, books and paper-based works, often from fiber she harvests herself. Outside of her state day job, she’s in the backyard beating pulp.
“I would consider myself to be an artist, paper maker, educator, community person and all of those things connect,” Rue says. She seeks to build community, first and foremost, she explains, and has spent time quite literally rooting her art in Sacramento, growing her own dak, sourcing milkweed from nearby farms and leading workshops to educate the neighbors on Korean culture. Material matters, she insists: “Where things come from physically but also culturally — those are all important pieces of my practice.”
She showcases a patchwork square hanging from a cupboard — translucent panes of handmade paper joined by hand-stitched seams. It’s inspired by bojagi, the Korean wrapping cloth tradition. To create these pieces, Rue practices jogakbo, a patchwork method that pieces scraps into something whole.
“This one’s called Han as void,” Rue says, “Han is this very Korean concept. Part of it is about deep grief and rage.” She identifies those sentiments as a product of how Koreans felt under Japanese occupation from 1910 to 1945. During this time, Japan forcibly began the process of “Japanization” banning the use of Korean names and the Korean language.
On the page, and in the seams, Rue courts uncertainty. She painstakingly used her press to print fragmented sentences from across traditions — Buddhism, the Bible — then quilted them into paper: “Shall I exist in the future? Having been, what shall I become?” The inquiry is aesthetic and historical.
“Papermaking actually went from China to Korea to Japan,” Rue says. “Koreans came up with our own indigenous method of sheet forming and a lot of [that] gets lost.”
By referring to her work as hanji (or Korean paper) — not washi, or Japanese paper — and practicing it from the bark up, she reclaims Korean papermaking in a field where Japanese terminology and methods have often been treated as the default.
Rue picks up a vertical screen resting on a frame and describes that this follows a traditional Korean papermaking method where fibrous pulp can fall from the sides. The Japanese approach places the screen within the frame and catches the pulp. The techniques may look similar, she adds, but the way each sheet is formed creates distinctly different textures and qualities in the final paper.
Stitching a lineage back together
Rue studied history and sociology at Stanford, worked in publishing and editing, then fell for letterpress at the San Francisco Center for the Book. An MFA at the University of Iowa’s Center for the Book gave her rigorous training across bookbinding, papermaking, printing and lettering arts. After graduating, a Fulbright research project took her to Korea for a year to study traditional methods — hanji, book forms, woodblock printing and, unexpectedly, bojagi with a teacher she visited weekly.
If Iowa drilled craft, her time in Korea probed the harder question: What does it mean to inherit a tradition? Rue reflects on whether the fiber must be grown in Korea or whether the technique is place-bound. “Can I even call what I’m making hanji because I’m not in Korea?” she asked.
Her relationship to her culture as a Korean American took on many forms. “Not Korean enough, not white enough [because] I grew up in the minority,” she says about growing up in Ohio (her husband’s work brought them to Sacramento). Yet, as an artist, she has had an opportunity to examine her identity. She notes that Christian churches anchor much of the Korean immigrant experience in the U.S., yet they also become flashpoints over what — and how much — to assimilate.
“Many of us have experienced religious trauma [and are] looking for the truly Korean, more indigenous form of spirituality,” she says.
For her, the deeper fidelity is to relationship: to process, land, lineage and to the communities you build around the work. “Book art was my way into a spiritual practice,” she says. “It’s repetitive, meditative. You’re making multiples, but you’re also making meaning.”
She has since launched a slate of projects rooted in Korean ancestry: the Korean American Artist Collective, which she co-founded in 2020; Hanji and Spirit, a cohort exploring Korean paper traditions and spirituality; Hanji Edition, a publishing project with designer Lars Kim producing limited editions on hanji; and a free workshop series for the Korean diaspora funded by the City of Sacramento’s Seeding Creativity grant.
A backyard operation
Rue’s studio is as local as it gets. Years ago, a teacher in Korea gave her a sapling of dak. She planted it in her parents’ Sacramento backyard.
Papermaking begins in winter after the leaves fall. Rue cuts dak near the base so it will regrow, steams the branches, peels the bark and scrapes away the brown and green layers to reveal the white inner bark. That bark is soaked and cooked with soda ash to remove impurities, then beaten by hand into pulp. The pulp goes into a vat with water and a formation aid that slows drainage and allows very thin, strong sheets. Using a bamboo screen set on a frame, she lifts and drains the slurry, repeating dips for added thickness before drying the sheets in a homemade box, sometimes embedding leaves and stems from her garden.
She also experiments with regional plants — mulberry from a neighbor, and deseeded milkweed sourced from a farm in Winters in Yolo County.
“Using this local material that was going to get thrown away anyway … is very true to the papermaking process in Korea,” she adds.
The studio spills into family life not as a brand, but as a household practice. Rue’s kids, 6 and 8, help where they can — beating fiber, hauling buckets, playing with pulp like clay.
Rue says that after moving to Sacramento and becoming a parent, she began reflecting on how to raise her children with more intention—wanting them to feel a stronger sense of connection to their Korean heritage than she had herself growing up.
She has tried to facilitate spaces for her children to connect with their heritage, which in Sacramento was not initially straightforward.
“When I came to Sacramento and started making hanji in the backyard, I’d put out a call — ‘Hey, I’m scraping dak (paper mulberry) on Saturday’ — and nobody showed because nobody knew what that was,” she says, laughing. “Now people are curious [and] they understand it’s special. But it took time and a lot of teaching.”
This is the part of Rue’s practice that surprised her: The teaching and community work didn’t distract from the art, it became central to it. The grant from the city allowed her to offer free workshops specifically for the Korean diaspora.
The studio turned into a cultural commons — a place to process fiber and, often, feelings like religious trauma, language loss, the tender calculus of being Korean “enough.”
Sacramento has been a space to grow and explore her identity as an artist. Rue finds comfort in artist-run studios like Prism Art Space and curators like Jazel Munoz giving first-time exhibitors a shot. “It’s a big city, but the art scene feels small and accessible,” she says. “It just feels very cozy, especially among BIPOC artists that I know.”
But, sustainability — artistic and financial — is the unglamorous kernel of any creative story. Rue has done the math the hard way: years of workshops, grants and unpaid organizing. She’s frank about the precarity of trying to raise a family in California while pricing sliding-scale workshops and laboriously handmaking art.
Some of her pieces are on view at SOHN, a Korean café and art space in San Francisco, along with her new Hanji Edition being released in February at Oakland’s Codex International Book Fair.
On her table, translucent paper panels strewn about illuminate embedded stems from the garden — a thin green line held between fibers. “I feel really grateful that I landed here,” reflects Rue. “It’s been really nice to … get to know the people around me, the plants around me and learn more about Sacramento and its history.”