Lee Yong Deok’s Inverted Sculpture:
Illusion Taking Its Own Life — and Being Resurrected
Kate Lim (Director of Art Platform Asia)
I first encountered Lee Yong Deok’s Inverted Sculptures around 2007, and the experience left a lasting impression. His works were both striking and uncanny. From a distance, they resembled raised reliefs, but as I moved closer or shifted my viewpoint, the seductive image would suddenly dissolve—as if snapping out of a dream. At the time, Lee’s Inverted Sculptures were already gaining attention on the international stage, featured in biennales and major museums abroad, and recognized as important contributions to contemporary art. In Korea, too, he was a frequent presence in major exhibitions. It felt only natural that his work was receiving such acclaim.
At the same time, however, I noticed a curious phenomenon. While exhibition curators and art enthusiasts seemed to appreciate Lee Yong Deok’s work, local art critics appeared to regard it as something outside their sphere of interest. To me, the main reason seemed clear: Lee’s Inverted Sculpture engages with illusion. At the time, the critical discourse shaping Korean contemporary art tended to dismiss illusion as a pre-modern technique, often undervaluing works that employed it. In that context, the 2024 symposium “Lee Yong Deok’s Inverted Sculpture – The Persistence of the Moment: THE MOMENT NOT A MOMENT,” held at Total Museum of Contemporary Art, was a welcome and timely initiative. It sought to reexamine the aesthetic interpretation and art-historical position of Inverted Sculpture which had long been met with discomfort by Korean critics. I believe that illusion must be placed at the very center of this reappraisal.
"Away With Illusion": The Doctrinal Chant of Contemporary Art Criticism
Modernist art theory functions like a kind of ideological school uniform for contemporary art criticism. According to this framework, the history of art is split by a vast chasm separating a "backward pre-modern" from an "advanced modern." Before crossing that divide, artists primarily produced realistic paintings and sculptures tailored to the tastes and needs of clergy, royalty, aristocrats, and the bourgeoisie. But with the emergence of Impressionism in the late 19th century, artists began to leap across that chasm, sparking a great exodus into modernity that spread globally throughout the 20th century. This shift is often framed within a kind of heroic narrative: liberated from the constraints of the past, artists were finally free to pursue expressive and intellectual work on their own terms.
There’s no denying that a major shift occurred between the pre-modern and modern eras—few would argue otherwise. However, I believe there is a serious flaw in the lens through which contemporary art criticism attempts to view past art, now perceived as unreachable beyond that great divide. What it fails to see is this: what we often call "realistic depiction" in earlier art was, in fact, the result of a sophisticated process—one in which artists used perspective and chiaroscuro to create and refine illusions that translated a three-dimensional world onto a two-dimensional canvas. This was not just a technique, but a fundamental invention that shaped the very nature of painting. Yet the lens contemporary criticism often employs is calibrated only to recognize works like those of Picasso—images that dismantle illusion and deconstruct form—as "progress." It can no longer see, for instance, how the stiff and awkward drapery in earlyicons of the Madonna and Child evolved, over centuries, into the natural folds and volumetric grace found in the works of Leonardo da Vinci. Such progress, rooted in the refinement of illusion, remains invisible to that narrow gaze.[1]
In the minds of critics who look through this particular telescope, artistic excellence is not defined by faithful representation of reality, but by the ability to produce something new. This idea is placed front and centre, shaping their critical lens. As a result, they are inclined to view the transition to modernity as a wholesale rejection of realist representation—and to believe that art advances only through the revolutionary erasure of what came before. As the 20th century surged forward, the contemporary art world intensified its calls to break with realism and illusion, eventually promoting the notion of the reduction of painting—the idea that only the most essential elements should remain, while all others must be eliminated.[2] Even authorship—the trace of the artist’s hand—was added to the list of things to be erased. Manual craftsmanship came to be seen as dangerous, revealing too much of the artist’s individual sensibility.[3] In contrast, works produced under industrial conditions were praised for their conceptual clarity, unclouded by emotional or psychological residue. This anti-illusionistic and reductionist impulse extended to sculpture as well. To faithfully realize the ideals of modernism, sculpture was expected to abandon traditional figuration entirely and even relinquish much of its material volume—its very physical presence in space.
Illusion Taking Its Own Life — and Being Resurrected
Still, I find this kind of contemporary art discourse to be overly one-dimensional in its view of artistic progress. The purging of past practices is not the sole—or definitive—driver of artistic evolution. Art advances not through erasure alone, but through the creative choices and sustained efforts of artists. It evolves, layer by layer, across time. That is why so many artworks remain with us today, as enduring legacies within the long continuum of art history. Lee Yong Deok was never the kind of artist who self-censored to align with critical trends. Instead, he embraced the very elements contemporary criticism often rejects—illusion, handcraft, and figuration—and wove them together into unexpected relationships that generated striking reversals. What drew me to his work was how it bypassed the binary lens that separates the pre-modern from the modern and instead gave visual form to something deeply universal.
At its simplest, Lee’s Inverted Sculpture is a negative carving—a hollowed form. Seen up close, its contours are illegible, void of clarity. But from a precise angle, at a certain distance, a vivid, seemingly three-dimensional image emerges: an illusion of presence. The absence of the hollow transforms—almost magically—into the presence of relief. And then it slips away again. What was a full image from afar collapses into an unrecognizable depression as you move closer.
In Lee Yong Deok’s Inverted Sculptures, concave construction and convex illusion coexist in a strange harmony—like a dual body, masculine and feminine, solid and void. But the illusion does not arise on its own. It is not simply an optical trick, but a deeply perceptual experience that depends entirely on the viewer’s engagement. Lee may carve the negative form, but it is the viewer who animates it who grants life to the hollow space through the act of looking. In this sense, the viewer is given a kind of god-like power: to create the image, and to destroy it, all through the shifting of perspective. Illusion here is not a deception—it is an event, a relationship, a moment of co-creation. Lee’s work is not merely a playful manipulation of form; it is a statement on the intimate, fragile bond between artwork and observer. His illusions are always in ruin and in resurrection, brought into being and undone again by the gaze. They live in a state of tension: present yet unstable, seen and un-seen. In this way, illusion in his work exists under erasure, not because it fails to appear, but because it cannot fully belong to either presence or absence. It is both there and not there, depending entirely on how we choose to see.
The viewer, drawn into the birth and dissolution of the illusion, feels both surprise and delight. As they move closer to the Inverted Sculpture, they suddenly realize—with a kind of shock—that what appeared to be a raised form is, in fact, carved in reverse. The moment they step away from the "sweet spot"where the illusion is visible, the image collapses into a hollow recess, like a sunken pit, and they are left watching the illusion self-destruct. It feels strangely hollowing, almost mournful, as if the image they had just seen, so clearly and vividly, has taken its own life. Even as the memory of that "real" image whispers in the viewer’s mind, trying to persuade them it truly existed, there’s no recovering it from the wrong angle. And yet, this moment of disappearance doesn’t bring sadness. On the contrary, it brings joy, even amusement. The viewer finds themselves repeatedly approaching and retreating from the sculpture, amazed not just by the illusion, but by their own discovery of it. They begin to marvel at their own role in revealing the structure—how the convex image emerges from a concave form, and how perception itself completes the work. Lee Yong Deok doesn’t rely on critical interpretation or curatorial explanation to mediate this experience. Instead, he sets the stage for the viewer to investigate, experiment, and intuitively uncover the secret of the Inverted Sculpture. It is a space of wonder—quietly constructed but profoundly felt—where the viewer becomes both witness and participant in the unfolding of illusion.
I believe this kind of joy is a profoundly important aspect of art. When we look at a work and begin to sense what the artist has discovered—what sparked their curiosity—and how they captured that moment with extraordinary artistic clarity, the realization brings a kind of thrill. It feels like solving a difficult problem: there's a rush of insight, followed by a quiet sense of achievement. That joy becomes a source of energy—an inner vitality that keeps drawing us back to art again and again. But too often, especially in large international exhibitions like biennales, this joy is obscured. Instead of engaging directly with the artwork—seeing it, feeling it, understanding it on our own terms—we're nudged toward the wall text. We end up studying the explanation, trying to extract meaning through someone else’s words, and are subtly pressured to feel a certain way. After just a few minutes of this kind of forced engagement, the spontaneity and joy of looking can begin to vanish.
To understand and enjoy a work like Lee Yong Deok’s Inverted Sculpture, the most important thing is simply to look carefully and feel attentively. This act is closely tied to the way the human brain naturally perceives the world. The visual cortex alone occupies nearly a quarter of the human brain. We are, in many ways, visual creatures. The neuroaesthetician Semir Zeki has argued that vision is the most efficient means by which humans acquire knowledge about the world, and that the visual cortex is not merely responsible for seeing, but also for conceptualizing what is seen.[4] When we look at art, our brains are not passively receiving images—they are actively thinking, interpreting, and engaging in highly sophisticated forms of intellectual activity, all through the act of perception.
Lee Yong Deok’s Eureka
In the beginning, Lee Yong Deok, like many artists shaped by contemporary critical discourse, placed great importance on the intellectual meaning of a work. But in the early 1990s, while experimenting with various artistic approaches in his Berlin studio, he experienced a Eureka moment—one that resonated with the discoveries of contemporary neuroscience. In an interview, he recalled, "The constant production of works that felt like shouting ideological slogans left me exhausted and hollow." He continued, "Whenever a viewer grasped the meaning I was trying to convey, I felt as though the work had already been discarded." It was as if the artwork existed merely as a vessel for delivering a message or emotion—and nothing more.
Then, one day in his studio, he tied a 6m-long wooden rod to the ceiling with string and tried to balance it. The rod slowly rotated, responding to subtle currents in the air. Lee found the quiet tension of that balance incredibly beautiful. He placed smaller rods on either end of the main one. Achieving balance wasn’t easy, but once it was found, he felt as though "time had stopped, and a new space began unfolding endlessly—as if being drawn into something mysterious and continuous." He spent several days immersed in that sensation—of time dissolving and space flowing.[5] And yet, the source of this powerful experience was not a profound truth uncovered through analysis, nor an insight gained through a written text. It was a fleeting but vivid sensory encounter, and it became the catalyst for a new direction in his work. Lee set out to translate that moment—that resonance of balance, perception, and quiet revelation—into form.
In the mid-1980s in Seoul before coming to Berlin, Lee had made an experimental piece in which parts of a human figure were rendered in intaglio (negative) and others in relief (positive). At the time, he had focused more on distinguishing between the two treatments—intellectually and formally. But he recalled that, curiously, some viewers had interpreted even the negative parts as positive relief, perceiving the whole image as continuous. During his time in Berlin, he began revisiting and expanding on the relationship between concave and convex form, experimenting with how illusion behaved from different angles and perspectives. These studies led to the creation of Aphasia – Interview upon his return to Korea in 1999.In that work, a human figure is shown in side view, seated in a chair. Using a laser, Lee cut the torso of the figure out of a single steel plate and separated the two resulting forms. The cut-out (positive) torso was positioned on the left, while the remaining void (negative) was arranged on the right. The two forms, both derived from the same flat steel sheet, now sat facing each other. Viewers are invited to shift their attention back and forth between the figure made from the extracted metal—sculpted in relief—and the figure formed from the absence of that same material—a concave silhouette. Strikingly, despite one being positive and the other negative, viewers consistently perceive the two seated forms as the same person.
Looking at Aphasia – Interview, a question inevitably arises: which side plays the more essential role in perception? Is it the positive form on the left, or the negative on the right? No matter how long one observes, it’s impossible to declare one more fundamental—or superior—than the other. They are of equal value. The viewer’s judgment, which quietly declares a draw, is entirely justified. This is because the eye and the mind naturally fill in the hollowed-out negative space, translating it into positive form. The viewer becomes the agent of resolution. Lee Yong Deok’s Inverted Sculptures elevate the experiment first explored in Aphasia – Interview. Instead of presenting positive and negative separately, he unifies them into a single, seamless experience. The viewer’s perceptual generosity—the willingness to read negative form as positive—is no longer a side effect; it becomes the very heart of the work. Lee begins with a traditional sculptural process: he creates a full, three-dimensional figure in clay—not a relief, but a fully modelled form. He then casts this figure, and from the mould that once encased it, he extracts the negative space—the concave impression left behind by the original. What once had volume becomes absence. Yet through the play of light and perception, this absence reappears as illusion.
At the core of this transformation from concave construction to convex illusion is light. Light touches the surface and carves out brightness and shadow—our brain reads this contrast as volume. When light falls across the hollows and ridges inside Lee’s Inverted Sculptures, it creates a play of highlights and depths. These tonal shifts converge, forming a clear, fleeting outline of a form that isn’t actually there. In traditional realist painting, artists carefully adjusted tonal values to create depth and form through shading. Lee, instead, imagines how his forms will appear when subtracted—how light will behave when cast across absence. He modulates the original positive’s height and angles so that its inverse, when lit, will give birth to illusion. In this way, the concave space speaks to light, and light responds. The viewer, receiving their dialogue, reads the result as a positive image. That is the essence of Lee Yong Deok’s Inverted Sculpture.
Sculpture in 2.5 Dimensions
Whenever I encounter Lee Yong Deok’s Inverted Sculptures, they strike me as sculptures dreaming of painting—or perhaps paintings dreaming of becoming sculpture. His work doesn’t fit neatly into the conventional framework of three-dimensional sculpture, because the dimensionality it creates is illusory born from concave hollows. What the viewer perceives, when the illusion comes into focus, is an image made of subtle shadow and contour—something more like a drawing or a painting than a solid object. If the concave form existed on its own, without context, it wouldn’t evoke this pictorial quality. But the coloured background supporting the hollow allows the illusion to cohere into a single, painterly image. Most sculptures stop at three dimensions, but Lee’s Inverted Sculpture steps partially into the world of two dimensions.
And yet, it would be misleading to call it painting. Traditional painting creates volume using only two-dimensional means—through tonal gradation and colour. Lee’s Inverted Sculptures, by contrast, combine depth, height, angle, and colour to produce a dimensionality even more vivid than painting. The sense of form in a painting is fixed, frozen in place. But the dimensionality in Lee’s work behaves like a living organism—it appears and disappears depending on where the viewer stands. No matter how skilfully a painting uses two-dimensional techniques to depict volume, it cannot match the intensity of the illusion achieved by Lee’s use of actual three-dimensional space.
That’s why I think of Lee Yong Deok’s Inverted Sculpture as 2.5-dimensional. It unsettles our categories. "Was that a painting or a sculpture?" we ask ourselves—only to have the image meet our gaze one moment and vanish the next, somewhere between the second and third dimension. This 2.5-dimensional feeling may be related to how we recall events that occurred in the three-dimensional world. Memories don’t remain purely in 3D—they often return to us as flattened, two-dimensional images. In that sense, our memory functions like a museum that holds both paintings and sculptures. Some moments are stored as painterly images, others as fully dimensional ones. And sometimes, our minds perform a kind of curating, allowing both forms to appear at once. In my view, Lee’s Inverted Sculpture reflects this hybrid structure of memory. It doesn’t just occupy space—it evokes the way we remember space, image, and form, all at once.
An Open Completion
Because Lee Yong Deok’s Inverted Sculptures exist in the space of 2.5 dimensions, they resist easy classification within traditional categories of art. They also stand apart from dominant currents in contemporary art discourse, which often aim to dismantle illusion, strip things bare, and push toward extreme reduction. In this context, it’s perhaps unsurprising that his Inverted Sculptures have not received much critical attention. But these works have a powerful ally: the viewer’s visual intelligence. The viewer’s perceptual ability has no interest in taking sides between illusion and reality. Sometimes, the image appears suddenly as a raised relief; at other times, a shift in position causes that same illusion to disappear. The viewer accepts both with equal openness. Whether the form emerges or vanishes, whether it appears real or reveals its hollow—each state becomes nourishment for perception, part of a fluid process that the viewer takes pleasure in navigating.
Lee Yong Deok builds on this generous receptivity. Rather than declaring his works complete in a fixed way, he offers them as invitations—for viewers to experience their own Eureka moments, just as he once did. His Inverted Sculptures do not announce their completion; they await it. Completion arrives only when the viewer steps in, looks, shifts, discovers. In this way, the artwork remains open—an open completion—made whole not by the artist alone, but by the viewer’s gaze and recognition.
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About the Contributor :
Kate Lim studied English Literature at Yonsei University. As director of Art Platform Asia, her curatorial projects include Humming of Colors (2024) and Eloquence of the Visual (2022), which combine theatre and visual art. She organized the international art forum Fracturing Conceptual Art: The Asian Turn (2016). Her publications include Park Seo-Bo: From Avant-Garde to Écriture (2014) and What on Earth Is Dansaekhwa? (2024). Her forthcoming book, Park Seo-Bo: Crafted Abstraction (temporary title), is scheduled for publication in 2025.
[1] Margaret Livingstone, Vision and Art (New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 2002), 115.
“The art historian John Shearman has written that Leonardo da Vinci was the first artist to use value consistently across colors, achieving tonal unity in which a figure presents a single, swelling, homogenously generated volume in contrast to the inevitably fragmented effects of colour-modelling.”
[2] Kate Lim, “What on Earth Is Dansaekhwa?” in Here & More: Dansaekhwa and Beyond (Seoul: LEEAHN Gallery, 2024).
[3] James Meyer, Minimalism: Art and Polemics in the Sixties (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2001), 142–43.
[4] Semir Zeki, Splendors and Miseries of the Brain (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), see “Part I Abstraction and the Brain”; and Kate Lim, “Misuleunshigakiboneneunchodaechang,” The Law Times, June 23, 2022.
[5] Lee Yong Deok, Conversation with Biljana Ciric (Seoul: Pyo Gallery, 2009), 90–91.