Lee Yong Deok and the Double Negation of Sculpture
Kim Won Bang (Art Critic)
Lee Yong Deok is an artist who has long been deeply engaged with the nature of reality and its representation, questioning how our epistemological experience shapes what we perceive as real. One of his signature methods for exploring this theme is the use of negative sculptures, where solid and void are inverted to create hollowed-out forms. His execution of these works is nothing short of astonishing— both technically impeccable and conceptually profound. These sculptures generate an illusion that borders on the magical, yet what intrigues me the most is that this illusion is not merely an optical trick. Rather, it serves as a fundamental inquiry— both into the very essence of what defines sculpture and, more broadly, into the intricate relationship between the world and ourselves.
A woman cheerfully walking forward, another napping on a sofa, a girl leisurely writing a letter while lying on her stomach. Playful children, teenagers engaged in a basketball game—in sculpture, few subjects feel as familiar, accessible, and universally pleasant as these. Yet, as the viewer approaches Lee Yong Deok’s sculptures, what unfolds is not the expected tactile pleasure of sculptural texture or intricate detail but rather an unsettling experience—one that shakes the very foundation of perception and consciousness. The three-dimensional figures of these girls, initially appearing as tangible presences, suddenly dissolve, much like virtual reality projections. They deceive the viewer’s historical sense of time, vanishing into nothingness. What one ultimately confronts is not a solid sculptural mass but a hollow void—an inverted negative form where positive and negative space have been reversed. The best way to describe this experience is through a sense of deprivation: "The girl I reached out to touch was, in reality, nothing but an empty cavity, devoid of any material existence." One realizes they have seen something that was never there—an illusion. Everything they trusted has suddenly been taken away. But what is lost is not just the physical volume of the sculpture. The thematic pleasure and symbolic meanings associated with these figures—"a girl taking a nap," "a girl reading a book"—also evaporate. In the end, what remains is neither sculpture nor absence but something best described as a perplexing hybrid: sculpture-deprivation, sculpture-evaporation, sculpture-absence. Here, deprivation, disappearance, and absence are not simply "nothingness" but rather the negation of
presence—or, conversely, the trace of presence—structured within an interwoven chiasm of perception. Liberating oneself from these phantom-like sculptures is no simple task. In fact, it may be impossible. Until the viewer is close enough to nearly touch the negative form, their visual perception remains deceived, persistently registering it as a solid, material sculpture. No matter how much one moves around, adjusting their perspective, the form appears to be there. From the moment they step into the exhibition, their senses and perception become hostages to the three-dimensional illusions these deceptive sculptures orchestrate.
Much like advanced virtual reality devices, Lee Yong Deok’s sculptures deeply implicate the viewer’s senses. What makes them so immersive is that the illusion does not exist in isolation; rather, it is realized only through its entanglement with the viewer’s spatial positioning, directional movement, and bodily engagement. The void is not merely seen—it materializes through the viewer’s active exploration as they move through space, shifting perspectives and examining it from different angles. In this sense, experiencing Lee’s sculptures is not about perceiving a solid, weight-bearing object but about engaging in an illusory interplay that unfolds within an ambiguous, hybridized space—one that traverses the concave void, the exhibition’s spatial framework, and the physicality of the viewer’s body. This dynamic interaction ultimately defines the spatiotemporal condition of Lee’s work.
Since the viewer’s visual and bodily perception is fundamentally implicated in the experience, Lee’s sculptures might even be described as a form of physiological sculpture. Rosalind Krauss, in critiquing vision-centered interpretations of sculpture, referred to such spatiotemporal structures as “spaces of pulse,” emphasizing how they disrupt conventional visual paradigms. In this context, the illusion created by Lee’s works is not an isolated spectacle but an event—one in which both the object and the subject (the viewer) are simultaneously entangled. His sculptures no longer merely present a material object or a realistic representation; rather, they immerse the viewer in a fully integrated spatiotemporal experience. In this sense, his sculptures function much like virtual reality immersion, forming a chiasmic relationship between object and subject, in which neither can exist independently.
Another defining aspect of Lee Yong Deok’s work is how his negative sculptures function as “a site” or “present traces” of something that once physically existed. Rather than creating new sculptural forms, his works capture the surrounding space of an actual object, preserving its absence rather than its presence. This
method—casting the void left by a physical entity—has been explored in contemporary art by figures such as Marcel Duchamp, Bruce Nauman, Richard Serra, and Rachel Whiteread. Yet, while Lee’s approach is distinct, it powerfully exposes the deeper problematic nature of trace as a sculptural phenomenon.
A trace inherently alienates the original object—first, because the trace itself stands in opposition to the original, and second, because the original continues to exist only as an absence within the present. In Lee’s work, the negative void is nothing more than the materialization of the external space once occupied by a presumed, vanished positive form—a girl’s statue that never actually exists within the work itself. What was once external to the girl’s form now persists as a lasting presence. Conversely, the actual positive sculpture—the girl—has disappeared into the past. Yet, the trace of its absence lingers in the present, transforming into an unfamiliar, coexistent entity. Lee Yong Deok’s negative sculptures are not defined by a simple dualism of existence versus nonexistence but by a paradoxical structure in which the negation of presence is simultaneously the negation of absence.
That which has passed—the meaningless, the already dead—persists here and now, within the present. This is what makes the trace so uncanny: it is dead, yet it refuses to vanish, holding the present in its grip. Thus, it becomes the voice of the departed, an absolute other that disrupts the very foundation of the here-and-now. This is precisely why Georges Didi-Huberman describes the trace as a “time-symptom,” a disruptive intervention into history and representation. It destabilizes the permanence of artistic representation, shifting the problem from depiction to one of temporality and presentification. It reminds us that the present is not a self-contained moment but a continuous process of othering, becoming, and differentiation—where the past refuses to disappear.
Through this trajectory, Lee Yong Deok reveals reality not through direct representation but through deprivation and frustration. However, strictly speaking, what is deprived or frustrated is not simply reality itself but rather the relationship between reality and the viewer. Traditional sculpture maintains an objective, distanced relationship between the viewer and the world. Lee’s works, however, present phantom-like illusions—forms that neither fully exist nor completely vanish, floating as present absences, as otherness embedded within the present. Thus, the distance between illusion and viewer dissolves. As discussed earlier, Lee’s sculptures
infiltrate perception within a physiological space of pulsating interconnection. In Lacanian terms, this disruption unsettles the symbolic order—the linguistic and cognitive framework that stabilizes the subject—forcing the viewer into an obsessive loop of self-verification: "Am I really who I think I am right now?" This destabilization is precisely what Lee’s work shares with Surrealist art and magic— the ability to shock.
Ultimately, what remains for the viewer is a pure awareness of perpetual drift— an overwhelming sense of witnessing an illusion while simultaneously observing oneself perceiving it. It is an excess of perception, a lingering uncertainty as to whether the illusion belongs to the world or to oneself. At this point, Lee offers only one imperative: “Focus on sensation.
About the Contributor :
Kim Won Bang received his BFA from the College of Fine Arts at Hongik University and earned a PhD in Art History and Aesthetics from Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne University. He previously served as a professor at the Graduate School of Fine Arts, Hongik University, and was the artistic director of the 2008 Busan Biennale. He is currently a member of the Advisory Committee at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea, and an artist and theorist engaged in interpreting the discourses and aesthetic values of contemporary art.