Narrative of the Inverted Existence
Kate Lim
Present-Image and the Young Lee Yong Deok
In exploring Lee’s works and philosophies, it might be worthwhile to go back all the way to the time when a burst of art scenes started off in Korea, and reflect upon what sort of social and historical background are germane to Lee’s artistic expression. The exact year in question may be variable according to different professional views, but, the time that I would like to highlight for my purpose falls infallibly on the junction when the monochrome movement was waning whereas figurative art was resurging in the middle of 1980sin Korea. Artist Lee Yong Deok, at that time, participated in a group exhibition titled Present-Image for a few successive years, as one of the youngest members. There were 30-odd number of artists featured in the exhibition, and all of them were fairly well aware that their art belonged neither here nor there: that is, outcast from the then-mainstream and being reluctant to jump into the Minjung Art wagon. Lee recalled in a recent interview,
“When I went over to the café to meet up with the other artists before the show, I realized that each of us was a loner, not belonging to any of the prevailing art groups, and I was rather glad to share mutual concerns and interest with them; we were together in our own elements… Minjung Art led by ‘Reality & Speech’ was exerting a great deal of influence among young artists, who felt stifled by the boundary and dogmatized ideas that abstract arthad imposed. The Minjung Art camp took as their main agenda to engage with the social, political issues. For them, art should not be put somewhere aloft, should not keep its purity intact like that of abstraction; artists ought to come down to the life of ordinary people, to be connected and to be relevant to the reality.”1
It seems that Young Lee Yong Deok shared the same resistance against the mainstream art trend as the Minjung camp. Korea was then in the throes of political trauma under the authoritarian government, and not a single intellectual could have been free from a calling to confront the social unrest and the angst of fellow citizens. Despite sympathising the Minjung group, however, Lee did not join the camp.
“I could not accept what was lacking in Mingjung art. They sacrificed the artistic technique for their political aims; it was coarse and crude in their pursuit of conveying Minjung-orientated contents. That was, I felt, a regression. I could not square their so-called valued contents with what I fathomed as the essence of art… I did not want to look at the only crust of
the society. I knew that it is charred with conflicts, but I wanted to look beyond that.”2
This comment sheds light on the contents of the alternative artistic vision of that critical period. It wasconceived and formed as opposed to two different movements. The mandarin nature of modernism was consciously guarded against; the edge of the iconoclastic, radical note had to be padded; but the impeccable execution and sophistication hovered on, so as to distinguish itself from the crude draughtsmanship of Minjung art. The contents should be also philosophical rather than indexical. I can imagine that these must have been the rudiments of the third art trend, which the participating artists of Present-Image might have vaguely shared among themselves.
The exhibitors including Lee were the first badge of artists who heralded the alternative art practice that was incubated in and emerged from the local climate, a few years before the term ‘postmodern’ with its foreign gilded aura landed in Korea. It is fair to call them the indigenous postmodernists of Korea. Their initiative was to develop into the full bloom in the next decade or so, feeding the contemporary audience to satiety due to such a brilliant variety. Some of the Present-Image exhibitors perished into obscurity, others just took up the teaching jobs, and some remained in silence as if fossilized in spite of their initial brilliance. The surge of the next younger generation with their skein of sensibility, already saturated with the postmodern element, gave a nonchalant push to those who sat precariously on the margin of the changing time. Only a few of them, including Lee, were to confirm their authentic presence in the explosive art scene of Korea.
What was at stake to young Lee Yong Deok at that time was existence (or ‘being’) and its essence, and the limit that existence faces; all the existential ponderings with the touch of traditional influences. It is interesting that his existential sensitivity did not really develop into Sartre’s Engagement. He was more inclined to the holistic view towards the solution of the problems; he presumed that one could either struggle against the existential limit, or keep detached from it, so the limit could be shifted inside of a being. Another issue that urgently occupied Lee’s mind was how to engage with contradictions; how to deal with the paradoxical relation of one to another. Lee’s nascent interest in the positive and the negative, and its potential artistic value were developed during such youthful contemplations. Lee left for Berlin in 1991, not knowing how all this inheritance shall coalesce into his genuine language.
2 Interview with the author, June, 2009
kl. k.7d.24.10. 1920 Berlin
On a sojourn to explore Lee’s art and ideas, there is one earlier work worth observing, as it fermented Lee’s vocabulary, and manifested in the successive inverted sculptural reliefs. This particular work, kl. k.7d.24.10.1920 Berlin(1995), is the 33 terra cotta boys. Each of the boys’ heads was cast in plaster. The 33 pieces were shown at the Invitation Exhibition of the Berlin municipal art centre, Schulmuseum. Lee explained that, in the autumn of 1994, he had found in a flea market in Berlin an old photo of 33 boys taken in 1920 just after the First World War in Germany. It was a class photo of first graders in an elementary school, and on the back of the photo, were the last names of all the boys written. There is something eerie about these 33 boy figures standing in a row. Andrea Pupe observed;
“33 boys who have their uniform tops buttoned up to the neck, enter and stand like fossils in the empty place. … by coming out to the world in this way, the small characters left the 1920s and time-travelled to the present”.3
Viewers are made to feel as if the existence of these 33 boys from the past has touched them. Theiruniformed terra cotta bodies are but a foil to all the different expressions on the boys’ faces. It seems that Lee passionately and intensively concentrated his imagination in envisaging each little boy’s heart. And yet, without the intrusion of some flaunting or excessive figuration, the work quite tenderly exudes mist of uncertain anxiousness that cannot be spoken in words. What arrests the viewers is not an enchanting copy par excellence; it is more the phantom-like presence of the boys from the photo. This phantom image persistently intervenes and encroaches upon the realm of their perception. Lee said in the interview with Biljana Ciric, curator of Shanghai Doulan Museum of Modern Art in 2005:
CIRIC: One of your most important pieces at that time was done based upon a photo from the 1920. You talked about the sense of human existence somewhere in your statement?
LEE: I was so taken in by it as if it were a void vacuum. The boys looked so fragile and downcast. The picture was not taken long after the end of the war. Shadows of unrest and depravity were hanging over them. I could imagine these boys going through the relentless upheavals of the Second World War, dying or surviving. What could have happened to them? I made each boy’s head by carefully thinking about them one by one. I got obsessed by all the possible situations the children might have gone through. I could not tear my eyes off their images. My sculpture tore open a window for the time in the shuttered silence, and within its present form of mass, it preserved time lived and forgotten, and thus made time occupy the present space.
It is apparent that Lee’s sensitive membrane was seriously disturbed by the contact with the quintessential elements of photo: image and text. Images of 33 school boys surged up in him with such a compellingpower that he just had to respond to this constellation of private feelings, compulsions, social and historical contents, and call upon his imagination. What Lee wanted to represent was a plethora of associations, memories, connotations about what it would be like for 7-year-old boys to sit in front of the camera not knowing their destiny; to grow up only to be swallowed into another war, surviving or dying, or wretchedly amputated, ending their lives in obscurity. Lee Yong Deok wanted to resuscitate this photographic death by transferring it to his sculpture. Although there still retains a classical chord of sculpturing in Lee’s works (the ‘time that is spatially arrested’), the temporal operation of German boys is multiple: it restores theobvious past when the photo was
3 The Berliner Morgenpost on January 18, 1997
taken, and it also reaches out to the boys’ future, enfolding the translucent past, and finally reveals the artist’s own present. Lee’s experience with the old photo reminds us of Barthes’ punctum.4 The image of the boys in the photo pierced the dry, frozen surface of the photo, and provoked Lee’s desire to summon animplicit past to something visually perceivable. The German boys figuration, incorporating the notion of punctum, shifts the ground towards the ‘within’ away from the ‘without’. More room for unspoken virtualities are permitted and a wider net, the edge of which is rather obtuse, is spread. The intensity is still there, and yet it does not seem to come from the out-bounding exposure. On the contrary, it sharpens its presence against our introversive aim for the beyond. Lee has transformed Barthes’ punctum, into a sculpture. Theemotional loss that was invoked by the photographic capture was re-established into the work of volume. What the volume represents is the pale trace of time that was witnessed and its last drop just before it was engulfed into forgotten regions. Here, I find poignancy. The artist retrieves the remnants of what has been thinned out in time: to find that his haul is in the form of ashen vestiges.
What Lee saw and was inspired at the sight of German boys, might have been a confluence of different genres or methods at the conceptual level. Or it could have been a paradoxically pallid trace of the thumping weight of human experiences ravaged and swept by war. Or his gaze may have dropped at a juncture between the gusty intake of the scars, such as in Anselm Kiefer’s works, its currency drying up, and its vast still pool of murmuring meanings. The photograph of 33 German boys struck a fatal plangency, and there was a note of suspension and brooding within the work: behind which it is waiting to be led into a new life.
Lee’s Idioms on the Inverted Sculpture: Transference and Traces
What made Lee Yong Deok’s name resonate across the globe was his inverted sculptures in relief-style. His negative figures on the sculpture are trapped in mid-motion, tinged with solitariness, and they all have such a detached ambience that they somehow disentangle their self-consciousness from the observer’s scrutiny; a girl walking with her hair gorgeously tousled by the breeze, a man with both hands thrust into his coat pockets, and his solid figure mantled in the folds of the coat; these are images of people that are ubiquitous all around us. It feels like you are seeing images of Lee’s figures flash through familiar memories and even glimpses of your own memories. The familiarity of the images is probably what makes Lee’s sculpture subject to instant attention from viewers. To resist the legibility and their affable simplicity is almost as difficult as trying to decipher a very complicated image. They linger in your mind just like still-images of a film. One can make statements on Lee’s figures with no qualms about its untenable paradox: “oh, I feel that I have seen them somewhere before, and I know that it only exists in my mind or in a film, but I presume it could exist.” As if gratified by this unassuming candour, Lee’s works present an ingenious sculpting technique to the viewers; in order to retain the image to our visual delight, we should keep it tantalizingly out of reach. If you approach close enough towards the figures, they cave in like a crater, becoming seemingly meaningless, as they are now simply ‘left over’ traces: the images disappear, leaving you with a suddensense of loss. You
4 Roland Barthes (1980/1981), Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, translated by Richard Howard, New York: Hill and Wang.
cannot retrieve the image without keeping a certain distance away from the piece. It has a structure that is destroyed by proximity.
Lee’s negative figures residing in, or rather, existing on the mode of, the negative space have a whimsical resemblance to photographic representation, in terms of the play of light and shadow: the casting as the ‘negative’ film and the ‘positive’ appearance as the developed photo. But in fact, Lee’s own concept using negative space has developed over the years, under the chains of much philosophical thinking, and these principal ideas accentuate what appears as the prowess of his negative figures.
Rachel Whiteread and Lee Yong Deok : Positivization of the Negative vs Negativization of the Positive
In charting Lee’s interest in the notion of negative casting within the contemporary art scene, there are also other artists far afield who experiment and explore similar concepts about negative casting, such as Rachel Whiteread or Bruce Nauman. The common ground which all of them share in exploring negative casting would probably be of subverting ideas: the spirit will not ensconce itself on the hearth rug near the warm fire, and does not seek for the milk of the Obvious.
However, one cannot help noticing that Lee and other artists diverge in their ultimate artistic bent, despite the fact that they employ similar formula on the positive and negative. For instance, to Rachel Whiteread,the negative space is the inside of, thus, forgotten side of positive substance. She gives a form to negative space; intangible space transforms to palpable mass. Her work Ghost(1990) is a large plaster cast of the inside of a Victorian house. It shows traces, or indeed, ‘the residue of years and years of use, on patches of wallpaper and specks of paint on the walls. Rachel Whiteread expanded her motif with the monumental work, House (1993), in which she casted a whole house that had been scheduled for demolition. In her work, House, all the features of a typical house are shown inside out: fireplaces bulge out and doorknobsrecede inwards, hollow. Whiteread’s negative casting gives a presence to the unrecognized void, and restores meanings and ideas that were embedded in negative space. Her sculpture elevates unfelt and neglected side to something architectural; her negative turned into another positive entity. This transformation into discrete entity is probably one of the most arresting features in Whiteread’s negative works. By contrast, Lee turns the side that was seen and perceived into the negative, employing the idea of aesthetic distance. Lee starts from the obverse whereas Whiteread starts from the reverse; the difference of two artists in a thumbnail sketch would be the negativization of the positive versus the positivization of the negative.
It can be said that Whiteread’s positivised negative is a ‘noun’. Lee’s negative, on the other hand, is better akin to an ‘adjective’. Marcel Duchamp used the word to elaborate on an idea, the infra-mince, or infra-thin. Duchamp says that the notion, ‘infra-thin’ is always an adjective, never a noun, so that it can never exist as a thing in its own… Infra-thin then points to a condition of liminality, that is, something on the threshold (between inside and outside, for example); the interface between two types of thing (smoke and mouth); a gap or shift that is virtually imperceptible but absolute; a separation or passage from one state or condition or dimension to another”5. Duchamp’s infra-thin refers to the attributes that cannot be classified as something discrete and separate. There is a similar ring to Lee’s conception on the negative figures. The negative castings are the traces left from the original, so they retain the prints of the original, but they are not exactly the original. The negative traces imply transference, and the change happening at both sides.
The Drowned City ‘Is’ and the Aesthetical Distance
The adjectiveness has much to do with the quintessential experience of Lee’s works, that is, a play upon one of our most sacred doubts and affirmation – it stirs up the serene surface where underneath it are heterogeneous orders entwined with one another. Only when a gliding swallow, all of a sudden, touches theequanimity of water, before it sails back up into the air, do we catch a glimpse of the submerged Is.6 What makes us experience such a moment, is the ‘distance’ in his work; by keeping a certain, optimal distance from the negative figures, can they incarnate into forms and flesh. This physical distance between his work and beholders has a strange attribute; this aesthetical distance elicits a perceptual response with its rebellious desire to break the distance; viewers are bound to break the distance, because they want to know, and what happens next is a kind of madness without method. When the viewers take a few steps closer than the optimal aesthetical distance, now, there is no sign of the object that the viewer believed he has seen; what is left is a disturbing denial in the negative shell. This is how the viewers experience being on the threshold of change, as mentioned in infra-thin. The moment of the form being formed and its subsequent dissolution into visual negation. His work hovers over that intersection, never celebrating one fixed moment. This evokes a musical beat, as images pulsate to and fro between different moments. It is as if Minimalist music resides inside Lee’s negative;7 the crisp projection of flitting images followed by its sombre defamiliarization.
It is in the format of negative casting that several tributaries of Lee’s ideas and perceptual search are inextricably bound to coalesce into one body. One of the contributing thoughts is, without doubt, his long-standing interest in the relationship between positive and negative, and their enticing formula of supplement and negation. Lee had been much engrossed in their efficacious value in delivering his then obsession: how to engage with antinomy. He had believed in his younger days that converging the two opposites and thus creating a harmonious image, looked like an ideal solution. In fact, he had tried to put positive and negative together in the same work. Later, during the stay in Berlin, Lee made an enlightening discovery of sense and what sense perceives, and eventually was he able to break himself away from this artificial symmetrycontrived under the conscious gaze.
5 Dawn Ades (1999), Marcel Duchamp, Thames & Hudson
6 A.S. Byatt(1990), Possession. A poem that is featured in the book, called The Drowned City (called ‘Is’): “…and he too sees/ His mirrored self amongst the trees/ That hang to meet themselves, for here,/ All things are doubled…”
7 This is a music genre, not an artistic style/movement, from the 1960s in America. Minimalist music is a way of composing music by the reiteration of several melodic lines and phrases of different harmonies and rhythm, and simply overlaying the different musical motifs on top of each other.
Bidding farewell to tinkering with such Kantian relics, he was led to focus on one neglected truism: ‘a negative can be registered as a positive’8. This break from the bond played a pivotal role in forging an entirely new idea upon the notion of negative casting; his good old negative, still faithful and retaining the element with only a husk of the trace of the positive, turned into a manuscript where Lee was compelled to write a completely new opus. One can discern the sonorous notes of the German boys’ phantom trace. This is the affirmation of ‘being’, which is derived from the negative trace that its original physicality had left behind. But, now, there is a significant change in it; Lee upped the ante, bringing in the leitmotif of existence – existence with a fissure, and vacillating moments, when the existence falters on the rift. Once the score was completed, Lee looked for his lyrics, and he found them in images of people.
From Rupture to Healing: Stored Image
Lee Yong Deok is an avid photographer. He keeps a well of images of people in the camera, and, ‘saves’ inside his own modulated sculpting concepts, ‘desired’ images. Flipping through the catalogue of his negative figure series, I sometimes fancy Lee in his own studio, breathing life into the negative impressions on the film, into the sculptural form, like Prometheus. It looks as if Lee brushed off the earthly bustle before and after the click of the camera button, then scraped off the crust of reality against his own whim, and glazed them with detached languor. Finally, here arrives a menagerie of his subjects; the people; with their existence suspended. In this, I find Lee’s negative figures to be compellingly recherché. One cannot easily shake off such chic atmosphere emanating from the figures when they are equipoised in between the positive and negative. Lee explains the purpose of having created such figures by telling us of procedure of ‘saving’ images:
“ … when I look at the people, and select the subject, I purely focus on the momentary identity; not their own unique identity, but the one that was encountered at the fleeting moment…This process involuntarily involves ‘opting out’ and ‘opting for’. How many people do we see whom we know in great detail about their self-hoodness? Like someone sitting, or walking, or in a red dress, someone’s identity is only momentarily witnessed at a certain timeand at a certain place. That is sufficient for me, and I find them uncannily beautiful… It is similar to poems, in that poems glow in the words which bear the [poet’s] pain of [having to go through] throwing out some other words … I want to have me in that wilful transference [severance] like in a poem.”9
This statement, I feel, is scintillating with his keen and ingenuous sensitivity. What Lee delves into is the momentary and/or fragmentary identity that severed its link to long, heavy details, details swirling around time and place but nonetheless, having substantial attributes, not just as a contingency. When we shinethe torch light onto this ‘severence’,
8 Interview with B. Ciric(2006), “ I realized that only my suggesting a negative was sufficient, for viewers have had a positive prepared in the mind’s eye.”
9 Interview with B.Ciric
what we see in his negative figures is the ghostly apparition of a being that is harshly disconnected. Lee says that this fragmentary being is invested by transcendental elements, which work as a visual statement where the essence of an irreducible moment is captured. Here, we bump into a sudden turnabout, viewers experience vertigo. How does something morbid (fragmentary) turn into something opposite (transcendental) by nature? This breathless leap in perception, underscores Lee’s enigmatic force; force to move and hold the form, cut, and then heal the rupture. Here we arrive at the nub of Lee’s notion of inverted sculptures; the fragmentary identity comes into being owing to the fissure within the existence.
Some would eagerly eye on the consequential side of the work; whether or not the rift or the scar is well repaired. The severance is tantamount to the chasm at close quarters. Seen from a distance, the seam ofthe separation seems to be nearly imperceptible. Furthermore, there is always the unexpected reinforcement assisting Lee’s manoeuvre, coming from beholders; beholders’ desire for it to be healed. In the work, Diving 0609 (2006), the one, single, vertiginous and hair splitting half a fraction of moment of adiver daring to look down is tweezed out. It is a near impossible feat for viewers to register that particular moment, but then, desire intervenes; it is a desire wanting to imagine the diver going through daring moments, defying the terrifying dizziness and enjoying the sweeping sensations of air and gravity. In Reading 0615 (2006), the mere sight of someone absorbed in reading and completely detached from what might be happening around them, evokes a mystically vicarious satisfaction. Whether the reader is involved with an intellectual challenge, thrust into an emotional maze, or even indulged in some abstract introspect, she is enclosed in her own serene perspicacity, and it is an envious moment.
Image as Identity
Lee elucidates further upon stored images:
“I have never seen my real face. There is only the reflection of the real face on the mirror, just “projecting” the reflection in your mind, which is the way to approach and know the real image of my face [or the object]. In understanding the real, projections or reflections of objects play fundamental roles. The purpose of “transference” in my work – a common quality which all forms of representation could inevitably have – is to represent or copy the image as it existsautonomously, breaking and denying the consequential running order, that is, the order of the original and the imitated… I save the image that is at its last stage, and that is distinguished from the rest of stages. I would think that this fictional image at one particular, the last, stage is self-governing. The proceeding, initial, stage is not a precursor to the image.”10
It seems that the image goes through a modulation in a number of stages, and at the final stage this “fictional” image, or rather, “fiction” has sovereign power. Lee explains that however fictitious, the chosen“fiction” stands in place of the real image, and becomes a
10 An interview with the author on January 2009.
referee in the game of the real. A famous existentialist Sartre tells a similar story through his play No Exit. In the play, three protagonists are placed in the hell. What defines hell? The non-existence of mirrors; a mirror gives you an image about yourself. It is a source of knowledge about the self, and an important ground that self can act upon, surmise, presume. It becomes obvious that the situation in hell is rather sickly, as Inez, the lesbian woman character, points out to the other two characters, “Why, you’ve even stolen my face; you know it and I don’t!” On the other side of the globe in Paris, someone had focused on the idea that the world inundated with subjectivity is hell. On this side of the globe, one artist tells about the characteristic of this very image, the absence of which made up hotel hell in the play. Lee explains that the image transcends its subjective-ness and earns an unfazed autonomy. Lee calls it the fictitious image and Sartre named it other people. A contemporary reader of Sartre’s play would ponder on the preposterous idea that the authority of the real can be circumscribed by its perceived image. A beholder of Lee’s figures would already stumble across the wondrous effect of the fictitious image.
Image as Soul
The Wonder goes on. A Czech novelist Milan Kundera knocks at this same haunting idea that Lee and Sartre explore, through the heroin of his story The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Tereza stands in front of the mirror, in order to see her self through her body. There is a shockingly beautiful description of why she does it and what she sees from the mirror;
It was not vanity that drew her to the mirror; it was amazement at seeing her own “I”. She forgot she was looking at the instrument panel of her body mechanisms; she thought she saw her soul shining through the features of her face…. She would stare all the more doggedly ather image in an attempt to wish them away and keep only what was hers alone….her soul would rise to the surface of her body…
Lee’s fictional image is christened as one’s soul by Kundera. What is submerged in the body and surfaces on the mirror, and what is the true “I”. What one sees on the mirror, is the aura of being one beyond the physical resemblance. Here, Plato’s voice might ring again – although it is a voice that is disparaging and scoffing. However, the undeniable truth is that this haunting issue regarding the fictional and the original has been taking up an immortal spot in the long art history whether we want to admit it or not. In this vein, the marrow of Lee’s exposition of the elements of the ‘stored images’ should be regarded as of canonical concern that keeps arising out of the different circumstantial whips of different charioteers of literature and art. This concern, a few decades ago, emerged in a frenzy during the postmodern discussion; this was done through an innocent term, Simulacrum, and its unhappy marriage with the ‘virtual reality’. Many of us remain much bewildered and annoyed at its vulgar alliance, and still have difficulties in shaking off the inevitable corollary of the unpleasant materialization of the initial issue.
In spite of all that, Lee is an intrepid explorer. Lee’s works compel us to walk through the hazy passages and help us reach out to the junction between the copied, fictitious fragments and the “I” that knows about the paradoxical strands of such fragments. This is what makes Lee’s art truly magnificent. The “I” perceives another access to the truth by means of fictional entity. Lee leads us away into the realm where wecan watch and understand Tereza’s lovable silliness of the Soul and Body. I can see that Lee’s negative figures are tantamount to what Tereza perceived about her Soul and Body; she negates the physical substance on the mirror, but acknowledges what is beyond the physical resemblance. This abstraction bears the narrative of the existence that has fissure; it perpetually desires a true identity which transcends its contingency and subjective-ness. There is a rift inside the chromosome of existence. This sort of operation is not possiblefrom the ‘normal’ frame of perception. This ‘unusual’ frame of perception resembles a special lens, which has the capability of capturing another lens, which clicks in a sweep, two different objects. Call it bigger, broader frame of perception, or different observatory, Lee is the artist who makes one bare one’s soul without the realization of doing it.
Evolution of Lee Yong Duck: Diversity and Experiments
Lee’s inverted sculptures came to eminence in the international art scene around 2003. Since then, he had been more concerned with the purity and pedigree of his own concept and the differentiation of his works from others. Lee’s prime effort has poured into the crystallization of his own formula, concentrating on the singularity of images of people. By and large, from around 2006, he started experimenting by incorporating narrative elements into his works. As in Philip, New York (2008), a solitary figure with a kind of minimalistic pictorial depiction, with spatial arrangement in the background produced a dramatic effect. As a result, the figures seem to be on a theatrical stage, performing a ‘visual soliloquy’. Philip is the image of a man who languidly leans against a psychological labyrinth, with half an unconsumed anticipation, lingering within the other half’s smothered desire. The artist seems to have given an acting directive, and the ‘actor’ seems to be putting on this act with certain rueful affection as well as hesitation. It is interesting to observe that however carefully Lee tried to guard the ‘purity’ and the ‘solitariness’ of the sieved images through minimalizing the indicative elements, the stories of ‘before’ and ‘after’, simply leak at the most captivating measure. Probably the reason for this betrayal is that the simple assistance of the backdrop exerts an explosive power, affecting the beholder’s desire to know; to the extent that this desire summons up the before and the after, and more. The offered background becomes a medium. With the henceforth liquidation of image doggedly at heel once the viewers get too close, they feel much more acutely aware of the loss, as if the negative space sucked up the efflorescent mesh of fantasy with a merciless snap.
Lee’s more recent works, exhibited for the Shanghai Biennale (2006, Aphasia in front of the car), Spain Biennale (2008, I’m still here), and Singapore Biennale (2008, I’m not expensive) are done at an epic scale different from the usual single image of figurations. The works are assorted scenes and images that are put together with seemingly arbitrary connections. Meanings are elusive and equivocal, but there is still a subtle nuance of accordance between the scenes if looked with the cautious eye; and you’ll find a riddle with clues. Lee, with the idea of the mise-en-scène, puts characters, lightings (amber neon-lights, or bluish or purplish filtered hues), backdrops, and the shot all into the scene. And all of a sudden, his signature negative figures, become a part of the mise-en-scène. Perhaps, this director is asking them to find a convoluted continuity with discontinuous shots. Life is not composed of consistent, equable incidents; it is full of unpredictable quandaries. Bevies of little details that come in between these incidents can often be misleading. In fact, quite often, one has to suspend reality and its time frame in exchange of truth, andtake capricious cadences
when and by thinking in perspective. The implications of the negative figures turned into the works’ themes, which are richly braided dramas.
New Works
Lee’s new works for this show play high and steep; there is a noticeable increase in the stakes. It seems that Lee is moving on to higher ground, where he can search for the portentous value of his concept on the negative trace. Overshadowed and Outshined are two works that have a mild dose of this, though with sorrowful tinges. A woman carrying her child, and a wizened old woman. Both are silhouetted against a background of huge dark shadows. Their presence is dwarfed so pathetically that even the negative trace seems to have come to despondent nonentity, engulfed by other presences. The juxtaposition of the shadow of women and that of other presences makes viewers feel the doleful state of the lesser-being of the women. It feels as if their life was on a tether for so devastatingly long that they are shackled by their own existence.
The children are quite familiar subjects throughout his oeuvres, and this time appears, too, the works with a recalcitrant girl, in Opening the Darkness and Taking a Risk: a girl who is about to step in the doorway. There is a faint sign of something intractable in the steps she takes and on her disdainful countenance. Lee’s sustained interest in the children’s image lends the works the allegorical touch; the children’s innocent and arguably healthy refusal to abide by the adult’s codes – their oblivious wandering into the unknown and the uncertain, and maybe a blessing of fortuitous discovery. Lee makes his own endorsement in the images of the girl, and tells her: go ahead, find your own Wonderland.
But the wandering does not always fall in the category of sweet perambulation. One might have to experience the vertiginous fall to where there is a violent disruption to all normative systems; where one is made to engage with the society at reverse entry. One would never be able to feel the same, as one’sinverted existence without its initial protective crust would be perpetually scratched and rasped against the sanctimonious and even vindictive claws of the reversed frame. First Kiss In Pink is a plaintive call of themoment when one crosses over the hedge of the ‘gazes’ of others and of oneself. Through this work, Lee’sconception of the negative existence reveals its subterranean component – although in truth, the thing underneath is forceful enough to erupt from the within and to present itself as another truth. What Lee was after, was the realm, the passage way at which the original reality passes, then lives its life differently again as a fictional substance. He not only intends to lead viewers to the passage and to witness what is happening there as mentioned above, but also beckons viewers to also walk the passage over to the other side. The naked man who holds up both hands as if signalling a surrender, intensely discloses the very moment that a fatal decision barged its presence through the mad oscillation of whether to give up or not. At the tilting moment, the existence changes its existing mode. Lee aspires to show this intricate paradox, by means of expanding the idea on the negative concept to that of the inmost zones; where the allegiance to the binary division of the existence gives way to the unstable back and forth, in other words, the trills of the existence.
The trills are embodied in Oscillating Bride which is composed of a countless number of pearly beads. In this work, Lee, as if he were Homer, portrays a visual story in medias res.
“In a sudden unexpected moment, the bride wavered in a veil of doubt….”
Underneath the lustre of argent congealment, the beads give off intangible quivering. They are like cosmic particles with which great happenstance and scheme is yarned, and the inchoate combination of which sends fatal frisson to one’s perception of life. The beads elude any univocal grip, with a perpetual predilection for the indeterminate energy. Lee’s negative trace dramatically transmutes, as if the solid mass of the surface were shot by beams of the artist’s perception and so one saw, instead of the inert surface, the myriad of dancing motes with palpitation; the vibration coming from the fissure of the existence.
A Final Thought: Suspended Tension
When an epoch of new culture is ushered, elbowing the jaded past, people who are steeped in thedisorienting social changes yearn for an alternative way of thinking. One common way out of the chaos and to acquire sanity is to construct plural narratives and create a novelty. The elements selected for the combination can be dazzlingly various. Using ‘hybrid’ and ‘pastiche’, one can build up an impressive library with an infinite number of combinations, each indexed with a card. Or there are those who take a different path; they choose to refuse something indexical. Their aspiration is akin to the ambition to embrace with poetic spirit, the extravagant encyclopaedic knowledge. Their characteristic of being less referential makes them a disengaged, observing intelligence, and it offers a reference point for those who wish to engage the unaccountability.
It is my belief that Lee Yong Deok’s art has a keen resemblance to this second style of approach to the truth, because Lee’s thesis is about the junction at which different reference frames are braided and crossed in the gossamer of self-governing verities. His negative figures are apt abstractions of the suspended existence; the quotidian and empirical understanding of oneself is entwined through the genuinetranscendence of self in the inverted entity. Lee Yong Deok explores this paradoxical region and hankers after it, capturing what takes place in that interstice. It is at this in-between that one is compelled to feel the tension arising from the threshold of perception. As Lee’s stored images have a rift and the existential stigma that is in all of us, their quintessential aspect is its constant non- fixed narrative of becoming. The story of becoming inevitably has the rich intake of all the things around life, such as the purpose of life, the unexpected causation, and the resignation to truths, etc. Thus, the story of the existence at the moment of negation and affirmation, gives us suspended tension, by ever pending the astringent sentence to life, in pursuit of something more inclusive.