Inverted Sculpture, Both a Legacy and a Subversion of Traditional Sculpture
Shim Sang Yong (Director, Seoul National University Museum of Art)
1. The Transformative Nature of Inverted Sculpture
Clay modeling, soil and labor, figurative sculpture, trompe-l'œil… These elements have been historically undervalued in 20th-century art, particularly in the wake of modernist movements. This essay argues that such a timely underestimation must be re-examined and historically recontextualized—at the center of this re-evaluation stands Lee Yong Deok’s Inverted Sculpture.
Every era leans in one direction or another. The dynamic movements once filled with adventurous spirit and the pursuit of new discoveries—cultivating both long-standing memory and innovation—now seem to have come to a standstill. Yet, this is merely a temporary retreat to the periphery of the visible world; the movement itself has not ceased. When the time is right, history inevitably calls it back into the foreground. Many of the divisions we have imposed—mainstream and non-mainstream, center and periphery, avant-garde and academia—are not rigid opposites but rather inevitable shifts caused by imbalances and their subsequent corrections. Nothing exists in complete isolation. What happens here influences what happens elsewhere. The rise and fall, as well as the interchange, between abstraction and figuration are no exceptions to this historical dynamic.
Jean-Michel Alberola (b. 1953), an Algerian-born artist who settled in Paris in 1962, made a striking statement in the 1983 exhibition Bonjour Monsieur Manet at the Centre Pompidou. He exhibited one abstract painting and one figurative painting, announcing that in a few days, the figurative piece would soon be veiled. As foretold, a red curtain was drawn over the figurative painting a few days later—an allegory for the supposed end of figurative painting. Yet, the history of figurative painting, sculpture, and concrete forms will undoubtedly continue, both today and in the future. The shifts in civilizations, the transformations of intellectual systems—though history’s flow always appears to bring forth the new, underlying this are structured patterns of time. The difference lies in the fact that these shifts do not operate mechanically but unfold in ways that overturn logical predictions.
Today, people think and act with a constant fixation on the new, often overlooking this fundamental principle. However, such a mindset prevents a true understanding of the present. “The desire to discover something new blinds us to the ineffable, transcendent meaning that already exists within what has been discovered.”[1] The relentless pursuit of novelty is, in fact, one of the most insidious forms of intellectual decay. In contemporary thought, attitude, and artistic expression, the notion of “newness”has been profoundly misused. Here, the “new” is often reduced to mere difference—a deviation from the past or a distinction from others, nothing more. When this notion of newness becomes a necessary and sufficient condition for art, it leads to a fundamental misunderstanding and misapplication of art itself. Despite the endless stream of so-called “new” art emerging like a sudden downpour, much of it ultimately amounts to nothing more than expressions of self-loss, anxiety, psychological drift, fleeting and superficial thought, or misguided aesthetic indulgence. The French thinker Simone Weil went so far as to suggest, with biting cynicism, that lacking such a talent for relentless novelty might actually be a blessing.
The distinction of art as an incomparable act of perception, sensation, and expression—set apart from the ordinary—has been significantly diminished, if not entirely nullified. Art losing its way or veering down the wrong path is by no means an accidental occurrence. Rather, it is the inevitable consequence of a mind afflicted with an obsession for novelty. The relentless pursuit of new allure, excitement, and experiences—as if on a hunt—can only lead to one inevitable destination: drift and aimlessness. Worse still, this state of drift is often mistakenly celebrated as a form of great freedom. Such thinking easily tilts toward an uncritical admiration of technological tools—tools that, in reality, erode the very foundations of life.
The redefinition and distortion of language play a significant role in the slippery trajectory of contemporary history. Slogans such as authenticity, innovation, and creativity bear a striking resemblance to the rhetoric of neoliberalism. What is celebrated today as artistic novelty often masks the constant pressure and subjugation imposed by the neoliberal economic system. This process normalizes the exclusion and marginalization of valuable traditions and pre-existing knowledge, making their dismissal seem unremarkable. Perception itself is recalibrated to devalue anything that contradicts the logic of productivity and profit maximization. Yet paradoxically, the more one pursues novelty, the more rapidly it collapses into routine. Those who constantly seek the new and chase fleeting excitement inevitably overlook what is already present—and in doing so, they become estranged from the meanings embedded within.
Søren Kierkegaard wrote, “The old is the daily bread that nourishes happiness. The old gives happiness.” He continues, “One grows weary only of the new; one never tires of the old.” Daily sustenance may not possess the fleeting allure of momentary brilliance, but without it, life cannot be sustained. The past is the habitat of both the mind and the senses. A mind and sensibility severed from the past resemble displaced flora and fauna—precarious, ungrounded, and caught in a struggle for survival. The absence of roots! “The tremor of the past never merely feeds upon the sensations of the present.”[2] Yet, we remain intoxicated by novelty, attraction, excitement, and entertainment, all while consumed by thoughts of the future. If our artistic sensibilities hold any refinement, it is largely thanks to the works of art we have encountered. The past, far from stifling newness, serves as a deep, resonant undertone—one that allows us to feel the freshness of new art all the more profoundly.
The turning points of history, the moments and mechanisms of change, are often shaped by seemingly insignificant events. History advances not through avant-gardes that inevitably turn conservative—for every conservative force was once avant-garde—but through those willing to bear the stigma of outdated academicism. Lee Yong Deok’s Inverted Sculptures, grounded in clay modeling, valuing primary labor, and employing trompe-l’œil as a central aesthetic device, bring us face-to-face with this historical dynamic. In encountering his work, we are made acutely aware of our long-standing bias toward novelty and the pathological fractures within modern perception, sensation, and cognition. His sculptures serve as a wake-up call, prompting us to reconsider what has been obscured by the relentless pursuit of the new.
When ninety-three German intellectuals signed a manifesto in support of Prussia’s decision to go to war, the German theologian and scholar Karl Barth (1886–1968) responded with dismay: "Ninety-three German intellectuals have issued a dreadful statement before the eyes of the entire world... I was horrified to see that nearly all of my German mentors had signed their names to it."[3]Barth’s doubts extended beyond their political stance to their very scholarship. "Now, I have come to question all my teachers in Germany, those great theologians. I felt that they had failed in the face of war ideology..." He continued, "When I witnessed how scholarship itself was transformed into '42 cm cannons of the intellect,' I experienced what one might call the twilight of the gods (Götterdämmerung).”[4]
2. A Chronicle of Prejudices
One of the inevitable laws of vision, illusion (착시, 錯視), is not harmful to the mind. The idea that abstraction and non-representational art—championed by the Greenberg-Pollock axis—serve as an antidote is even more absurd. Illusion is not deception; rather, it is seeing properly. The notion that it is a trap or an ethical failing is nothing more than a futile hypothesis, one that Platonists have long and mistakenly upheld.
The bias against sensation became a foundational problem of modern intellectual systems after Descartes excluded it from philosophy. Of course, long before him, Heraclitus dismissed sensation as a trait of the souls of barbarians, and Plato had suggested that to attain true wisdom, one would be better off removing both eyes and ears. In Meditations (1641), René Descartes declared that all sensory perception was prone to error—especially vision, which often only skims the surface of things and never truly reaches their essence. In Descartes' philosophy of doubt, the very first thing to be doubted was sensation. Modern philosophy was then built upon the Cartesian doctrine that ‘to become a rational being, one must distrust sensation, exclude imagination, and control emotion.’ Yet, the cost of Descartes' error was immense: he severed the mind from the body. From that moment, the possibility of thinking about living beings as both mental and physical entities was lost. Modernity may have fixated on authenticity and essence,[5] but what it pursues is a disembodied authenticity and an essence that neglects the body. This is precisely why Diane Ackerman characterizes modern theoretical knowledge as “the sensory misers” — a world built without sensory experience leads only to a perilous future. As she warns: "The sensory misers will inherit the earth, but first they will make it not worth living on."[6]
The critique of Descartes has, in turn, swung the pendulum to an opposite extreme—one that is no less problematic. Gilles Deleuze’s The Logic of Sensation led to yet another misunderstanding of sensation, a misconception that now dominates modern efforts to counteract Cartesianism. Deleuze separated sensation from the soul, only to reattach it to a mere mass of protein—a reversal that, in the end, is nothing more than a tedious extension of classical philosophy’s binary thinking. This time, however, the object of reverence is not doubt but the body itself, which becomes the new idol. It would be a mistake to assume this perspective is any less troubling than Cartesianism. In this context, it is hardly surprising that Deleuze exalts Francis Bacon’s paintings, where popes morph into chimpanzees and bullfighters become bulls. For Deleuze, this was not degeneration but the possibility of creation. And who was Bacon, after all? He was the artist who once looked at slabs of meat hanging in a butcher shop and asked, “Why is it that those things hanging there are not me?”
For Deleuze, the supremacy of sensation lies in a race—a race to lower humanity into the shared domain of humans and animals. It is a contest to see who will surrender their existence first and become mere flesh. For him, heightened aesthetic sensitivity is the swift reduction of being to body (corps), and then of body to meat (viande). But even these lumps of flesh will inevitably tremble in fear, seethe with rage, and be swept away by violence—just as easily as before.
3. The Meaning of Inverted Sculpture
3-1. Optical Illusion – Perspective – Trompe-l'œil
Let us narrow our scope and examine Lee Yong Deok’s Inverted Sculpture within the coordinates of the past half-century of art history, particularly in relation to two key debates that shaped contemporary Korean art. The first is its connection to the ideology of pictorial flatness, which reached its peak in the Greenberg-Pollock axis of modern art. This concerns the dark spell that the illusion–perspective–trompe-l'œil triad was subjected to under the Greenberg-Pollock doctrine—a kind of visual sorcery that cast a curse upon the eye as a sensory organ and on the very act of seeing. As a result, a new intellectual history emerged: one that championed the castration of vision, celebrating an artificial blindness as if it were a virtue.
Lee Yong Deok’s Inverted Sculpture boldly overturns the threefold visual castration imposed by modern art’s obsessive purism. His sculptural approach reinvigorates the very elements that modernist dogma sought to suppress: figuration (object and form), trompe-l'œil effects, and optical illusion. By organically merging two-dimensional and three-dimensional elements, his work restores depth to perspectival perception and actively embraces the representational aesthetics that the Greenberg-Pollock axis had dismissed as a mere physiological dilemma.
Aesthetic purism is inherently contradictory and self-divisive. The artistic framework that Lee Yong Deok engages with was already present in the work of French artist Jean Le Gac, who refused to conform to contemporary trends. While many artists eagerly joined the ranks of those denouncing figuration and representational aesthetics as illusions, Le Gac instead championed the aesthetic potential of fiction: “If I can conceive of a fiction, then I have a proof of my own existence.” From the outset, the distinction between figuration and abstraction, fiction and reality has been little more than an imaginary construct. These boundaries are not only blurred, but any discourse claiming that one mode expresses reality or truth better than the other is, in itself, closer to fiction. This is why French art theorist Catherine Flohic could say of Le Gac: “Le Gac is the painter who, in an era where everyone was proclaiming the death of painting, instead reconnected with the true wonder of its childhood and embraced its life with joy.” Lee Yong Deok’s Inverted Sculpture follows a similar path. At a time when many declare the age of sculpture—its raw materials, its tactile process, its visual engagement—to be over, Lee instead returns to its early years, reviving its material, gesture, and play. He feels the clay, molds with his hands, and engages the eye in an experience that is both sensorial and contemplative.
3-2. The Grace of Vision
The second key aspect of Lee Yong Deok’s figurative sculpture is that it has pursued a different kind of realism, distinct from the participatory realism that was a dominant force in his time. Lee’s approach diverges from the kind of realism that, as Michel Ragon critiques, assumes moral virtue simply by presenting polemical images opposing racism. Instead, Lee’s understanding of realism aligns more closely with René Girard, the founder of mimetic theory, rather than Nietzsche. According to Girard, the everyday world is the only space where true greatness can be perceived. He states: “Nietzsche, consumed by his own frenzy, denounces the true greatness of our world, only to ultimately destroy himself…”[7] History itself has demonstrated that Nietzschean thought, when carried to its logical extreme, has often led to catastrophic outcomes—not far removed from the devastation of National Socialism. It is ironic, then, that we are witnessing a revival of Nietzschean rhetoric today, a reckless fusion of Dionysus and Oedipus, molded into empty polemics. Such philosophy is rarely left in isolation—for it inevitably attracts those all too willing to turn its ideas into action, however misguided or destructive they may be.
The figures that appear in Lee Yong Deok’s Inverted Sculptures engage in simple labor and play, free from exaggerated or ideological interpretations. They seem to recede into the distance, yet simultaneously draw closer; they gaze outward, only to find themselves looking inward. Each individual carries on with their daily life, grounded in the quiet persistence of the everyday. The subdued pastel tones and stillness of their gestures subtly affirm the value of ordinary life, untouched by skepticism. These muted colors are deliberately chosen to enhance visual play and exploration, allowing perception to take precedence over overt symbolism. Scientifically, red light stimulates the brain, increasing grip strength by 13.5%, while cooler tones such as blue have a calming effect, suppressing neural excitement. In Lee’s work, this warm yet gentle atmosphere functions as a defensive mechanism—one that tempers the intrusion of Dionysian excess and Oedipal turmoil, grounding the viewer in a moment of quiet, contemplative presence.
Lee Yong Deok’s Inverted Sculpture dwells in the act of seeing—its essence and the pleasure it evokes. As Ragon once asked:
“… The right to the pleasure of the eye, the joy of vision—why must we abandon all of this? Why must we deprive our neighbors of these rights, rights they have never even had the chance to enjoy?”
Seeing is, in itself, a form of grace. Its limitations are simply another name for its possibilities. In 1829, Goethe, in his Theory of Colors, wrote: “People search in vain beyond appearances. But what they seek is found within appearances themselves.”[8]Likewise: “The brain does not see, hear, speak, or feel… Sensation is the extended chain of inheritance that connects us to all those who have come before. It links us to others, to animals, beyond time, space, and chance.”[9] Lee Yong Deok’s understanding of vision aligns closely with this perspective. In Inverted Sculpture, the force that drives its reversal is a deep commitment to the fundamental nature of vision itself.[10]
Existing outside the two dominant currents that have shaped Korean art over the past half-century, Inverted Sculpture has quietly fractured the mainstream, carving out a singular artistic world of its own.
3-3. The Visual Meaning of Inversion
The Inverted Sculpture of immateriality and absence operates through two key elements. The first is the absence that forms as the viewer’s gaze approaches—a hollowed-out, non-existent space, one that becomes perceptible precisely through its concavity. The second is the two-dimensional pictorial support, which extends and reinforces the inversion effect. This dynamic interplay heightens the aesthetic mechanics of Inverted Sculpture, allowing its optical tension to function in a dramatically intensified way. The pictorial support is not merely a physical substrate but an active mechanism that amplifies the visual drama of the work. Through the interaction of three-dimensional form and two-dimensional surface, the sense of inversion is further emphasized, making the work’s visual impact all the more striking.
The viewer’s gaze struggles to distinguish between protrusion and recession. What is concave appears convex, and what is convex reads as hollow. Is this a confusion of depth and projection, a perspectival chaos, a temporary impairment of vision itself? And yet, this is the true nature of sight—one that does not impose a subjective perspective or dictate a singular viewpoint, but instead exists as pure visual perception, a state of searching and tension. It is a way of seeing that transcends what is merely shown, leading outward into the world of facts and reality. Seeing is always in relation to what is unseen. Different viewers perceive different things in the same object. One may see clearly, another may misinterpret. One may look deeply, another only superficially. Conversely, flawed thinking is almost always tied to flawed seeing—an inability, or an unwillingness, to perceive. In today’s world, the act of seeing has been corrupted by advertising and media, reduced to an object of consumption.
Another way to explain this is through the pleasure of vision itself. In Inverted Sculpture, the gaze lingers in the space between advancement and retreat, where presence and absence visually intermingle. It delights in the interplay between form and inversion, engaging in a game with a shape that is both material and immaterial. The air is not absence—it is a material realm, densely packed with nearly five trillion tons of mass. Though we casually describe it as “empty,” the atmosphere is, in reality, filled with substance. Our vision is keenly attuned to this condition, continuously perceiving and interacting with it as it navigates objects, detects depth, and absorbs detail. Just as we sense the resistance of air, like the way gusts of wind carve through a valley, vision too detects the oscillations of air, the waves of particles, grazing across surfaces as if reading them by touch. It is an exploration akin to navigating the cavern of Aeolus, the god of winds. Here, the blurred boundary between material and atmosphere, between presence and absence, awakens the tactile nature of sight itself. It jolts perception into consciousness, stirring thought from its slumber. Seeing is always more than just a function of the eye—it is an act beyond its mere physiological mechanics.
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About the Contributor :
Shim Sang-yong received his BFA and MFA in Western Painting from Seoul National University, and later earned two doctoral degrees in France: a PhD in Fine Arts from Paris 8 University and a PhD in Art History from Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne University. He is currently the Director of the Seoul National University Museum of Art and a Professor in the Department of Sculpture at Seoul National University. Since 2018, he has also served as a member of the Advisory Committee of the Seoul Museum of Art. His major publications include When Art Becomes Necessary in Life (2020) and Art-tainer: Contemporary Art Behind the Mask of a Clown (2017).
[1] Simone Weil, La pesanteur et la grâce, trans. Yoonjin (Seoul: Sahoe Pyeongron, 1999), 199.
[2] Pascal Bruckner, For the Days That Have Yet to Come, trans. Se-jin Lee (Seoul: Influential, 2023), 114–15.
[3] Karl Barth, “Letter to W. Spoedlim,” January 4, 1915.
[4] Karl Barth, Autobiographical Texts (Autobiographische Texte)(Münster: Faculty of Protestant Theology, Münster University, 1927).
[5] Mark Smith, Sensory History, trans. Sang-hoon Kim (Seoul: Sungkyunkwan University Press, 2010), 59.
[6] Diane Ackerman, A Natural History of the Senses, trans. Young-mi Baek (Seoul: Jakga Jeongsin, 2023), 442.
[7] René Girard, I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, trans. Jin-seok Kim (Seoul: Moonji Publishing, 2004), 219.
[8] Ibid., 514.
[9] Ibid., 524, 526.
[10] Sang Yong Sim, “Praise of Life, and the Aesthetics and Perception of the Negative.”