Lee Yong Deok, Sculpting Time
Choi Tae-Man (Art critic)
Reconsidering the Formal Elements of Sculpture
A man rinses his hair with water from a basin, then cups his hands to splash his face. Eventually, he covers his nose and mouth with both hands. This series of movements brings to mind Eadweard Muybridge’s sequential photographs. I begin to wonder: was this work perhaps based on a series of still images capturing the subject washing his face? My questions start here. Is this a painting that transposes photographic imagery, or is it a sculpture? The hands alone are rendered in color, emphasizing their three-dimensionality amid an otherwise monochromatic composition—yet this is not a painting. Its faithful representation, without editing or manipulation, gives it the truthful quality of a photograph. Still, the work—comprising four frames—is neither a printed photograph nor an image painted on a flat surface. It is a painted relief.[1] Look closely at the softly folded fabric or the basin that protrudes slightly behind the figure’s right foot. What is astonishing is that the volume, which at first glance appears to rise outward like a bas-relief, in fact recedes inward. This inversion is where the illusion truly shines. And it is space and light that make such illusion possible. In truth, illusions are more commonly associated with representational painting than with sculpture, which tends to emphasize the physical presence of material. As Herbert Read once said, “If painting is the attempt to depict the illusion of space on a two-dimensional plane, sculpture deals with the object itself in three dimensions.”[2] But is that always the case? Lee Yong Deok’s wash up presents a number of qualities that challenge conventional definitions of what sculpture is.
Traditionally, sculpture has been defined as a three-dimensional art form created from materials such as clay, wax, stone, wood, or metal—later expanding to include non-ferrous metals, plastics, and other modern synthetic substances. As three-dimensional forms shaped through material processes, sculptures occupy physical space and are inevitably subject to gravity. They have height, width, and depth. One of sculpture’s essential formal elements—mass—conveys a sense of tangible presence through physical weight and density. When an object is placed in space, it occupies a specific area distinct from all other objects. The amount of space an object takes up is referred to as its volume, while the amount of material it contains is referred to as its mass.[3]
The three-dimensional space that sculpture occupies or contains—its volume—includes scale, extent, depth, height, and width, all of which contribute to the sculptural presence of the work. Volume not only enhances a sculpture’s physical presence but also plays a crucial role in determining how it interacts with the surrounding space. The solid portion of a sculpture, which includes its mass, constitutes its positive volume—the physical space it actually occupies—while the empty areas within or around it suggest its negative volume, the space it implies rather than physically holds. In sculpture, mass often refers to the material presence of the object, whereas volume encompasses both the material and the space it defines or encloses.
Because both mass and volume are inherently connected to space, space itself becomes a crucial formal element in sculpture. This spatial quality can be divided into positive space—the space occupied by the sculpture—and negative space—the surrounding or internal voids. The physical form of the sculpture—its solid mass and shape—constitutes positive space, whereas the empty zones, such as the gaps or hollows around or within the sculpture, or the spaces between its components, are understood as negative space. Negative space contrasts with the contours of the solid form, accentuating the clarity and presence of the shape. In particular, voids enable light and shadow to create not only a sense of depth but also the illusion of movement. Light enhances the sculpture’s three-dimensionality and brings out the texture of the material. In wash up, however, the interplay of light and shadow creates an even more vivid spatial illusion—light is absorbed into negative space or bounces off the surface, constructing a sense of depth and motion that surpasses physical reality. In Lee Yong Deok’s work, the traditional sculptural element of mass is sometimes employed to highlight material presence, but at other times it is intentionally minimized or omitted so that the resulting emptiness—the absence of mass—takes center stage. As seen in wash up, Lee’s Inverted Sculpture gives form to empty space, generating a visual illusion that makes a fundamentally low-relief work appear as though it possesses full-bodied volume. What we perceive as a volumetric form is not a projection, but rather an inward void—a trompe-l’œil, an illusion. His works do not depict an illusion of space on a two-dimensional surface but rather construct spatial illusions within three-dimensional form, thereby traversing the boundaries between painting and sculpture. Wash up, being both painting and sculpture, collapses the boundary between flatness and volume, painting and photography, reality and shadow, while also provoking thought on the nature of image itself. On this point, the artist has said, “The photographic object (the real image), the photograph (the image of the photographic object), and the 3D sculpture (the image within the photograph) all exist independently within a reality that shares the same identity,” asserting that “even if they are composed of different materials, the images or concepts (presumed facts) of these objects are continuously linked and transplanted into other materials, thereby maintaining the same identity.”[4]
As we have seen, the key formal elements in Lee Yong Deok’s work are not mass, shape, line, texture, scale, proportion, or balance—the elements typically used to define sculpture—but rather space, volume, and light. As previously noted, the space and volume in his work are not filled but empty. In this regard, his Inverted Sculpture can be described as a form created by virtual volume—an illusory mass defined by void. The inversion of relationships has been a consistent theme in his practice for a long time, and thus, we must turn to his early works to fully understand its origin.
This Is Sculpture
Lee Yong Deok first emerged as a figurative sculptor when he received the Excellence Award at the 1986 Grand Art Exhibition of Korea for his work meditation in autumn. Given that the Grand Art Exhibition succeeded the former state-sponsored National Art Exhibition of Korea(Gukjeon), his award can be seen as a deliberate continuation of that institutional tradition. At the time, since 1981, the sculpture division of the exhibition—hosted by the Korean Culture and Arts Foundation—had granted the Grand Prize to artists such as Jeong Hyun-do, Kim Jin-sung, and Moon Insoo, who all pursued abstract sculpture. This shows that figurative sculpture had been pushed to the margins. It was in this context that Lee’s sculpture, marked by its faithful representation of the human figure, was awarded an Excellence Prize.
In the post-liberation era, Korean sculpture developed primarily around the Gukjeon. It would not be an overstatement to say that the Gukjeon served as both a gateway for emerging sculptors and a stronghold of academicism. Figurative sculpture in Korea, which refrains from distorting or abstracting the human form and instead represents it with realism, had maintained its lineage from Kim Kyung Seung—active during the Japanese colonial period—through artists such as Baek Moonki, Rim Song Ja, and Kang Kwan Wook after liberation. When Lee studied sculpture in the late 1970s, abstract sculpture and minimalism were seen as the dominant expressions of “modernity,” and the faithful depiction of the human figure was often dismissed as outdated. In the mid-to-late 1970s, however, artists like Shim Jungsoo, who focused on marginalized individuals with a socially engaged approach, and Kim Youngwon, who explored physical themes of gravity and weightlessness through the human form, expanded the scope of figurative sculpture. Nevertheless, such work continued to be regarded as conventional. Against this backdrop, Lee Yong Deok won the Grand Prize in the sculpture division of the same exhibition in 1987 with take a commemorative photo, earning him recognition as a rising sculptor.
Both meditation in autumn and take a commemorative photo are grounded in a realist approach to the human figure. However, meditation in autumn combines the formats of sculpture in the round and relief, and contrasts different surface textures—an effort to integrate heterogeneous elements within a single work. In take a commemorative photo, a realistic scene from everyday life is depicted: a woman seated cross-legged, resting her chin in one hand, sits beside another woman, while behind them stand two more—one fashionably posed, the other with a shoulder jutting forward—and further back, a fifth figure, faint in form due to perspective. Like meditation in autumn, this work fuses relief with sculpture in the round to emphasize frontality, which in both cases hints at photography as a point of origin. Lee’s interest in photography—“a single moment that is also an extension of dull time”—forms the basis of his sculptural approach, imbuing the work with narrative depth and nostalgia. This sense of nostalgia is also present in his Inverted Sculptures such as I’m Not Expensive and I’m Still Here. It arises from the fact that Lee’s works are based on photographs that freeze fleeting memories of ordinary moments and specific places. In take a commemorative photo, for example, all five figures gaze toward where a camera would have been positioned—yet in reality, they are looking at us, the viewers standing before the work. In this moment of mutual gaze, we look at the figures, and at the same time, we are seen by them. This reciprocal gaze recalls what Jacques Lacan described as the gaze—the cause of lack and the object of desire—capable of evoking a deep nostalgia.
Another emotional tone present in both works is one of quiet ennui. However, as Lee established figurative sculpture as his artistic direction, another sculptor—Ryu In—began to pursue a very different path within the same genre. Ryu’s work, marked by excessive emphasis on masculinist, heroic gestures, often pushes beyond transformation or deconstruction of the human body to an overt exposure of pathos. This expressive tendency in Ryu’s work has been described as Baroque intensity.[5]
Even if not to the heightened emotional extremes found in Ryu In’s work, there are nonetheless examples in Lee Yong Deok’s late 1980s sculptures where the human body is fragmented—or even distorted to the point of seeming abuse—in order to convey narrative. Works such as my friend has gone, a seemingly typical figure sculpture with the volume of one leg deliberately carved out to express an emotional state; driving a stake into the sky, water of endurance, the land where the wayfarer stood still, and from the ground—all feature human figures manipulated to embody Lee’s ideas and emotions. Some are simplified bodies suspended in mid-air, defying the laws of gravity, supported only by a single hand. In Gate of Will, two male torsos with outstretched arms are placed side by side to form a gate-like structure. This work is not unrelated to the movement known as "New Figurative Art," which gained prominence in Korea during the 1980s. As that movement evolved into Minjung art(People’s Art), reflecting social consciousness through representational sculpture, other groups such as "Nanji-do" and "Meta Vox" emerged in response to both minimalism and Minjung art, fueling the introduction of postmodern discourse into the Korean art scene. In this dynamic context, Lee Yong Deok began to develop his own world through the collective Hyun-Sang (現像), founded in 1986.
When Lee held his first solo exhibition at the Misoolhoe Hall in 1988, his classmate from sculpture school, Yoon Youngseok, expressed concern over Lee’s continued commitment to figure sculpture. Yoon wrote that “the sensibility for realism in his portraiture seems to outweigh any perceptual or thematic engagement with reality,” adding that Lee stood “before the task of manifesting an ideal figure through the formative will of an individual.”[6] Despite his friend’s doubts and advice, Lee responded with resolve: “Let’s hope that my experience chooses to walk the solitary path of the trail, not the paved road.” And indeed, from that day forward, he has followed that trail.
After completing his graduate studies in 1989, Lee held his second solo exhibition in 1991 at Choi Gallery in Seoul, under the title and theme RECEPTION OF CONTRADICTION. This reconciliation of opposites—modeled after the union of yin and yang—revealed the speculative dimensions of his work and reflected his process of internalizing dualities.[7] In sculptural terms, this meant expressing contradictions through the simultaneous use of relief (yangak) and intaglio (eumgak) within a single work. A representative example is the allure of the olympics(1986), in which the male torso and dynamically extended arm are rendered in intaglio, while the clenched fist is in relief. The volume of the muscles is sculpted with a realism that rivals actual anatomy, making the piece both a relief and a sculpture in the round. Against the backdrop of a wall-like relief that seems to confine the human body, a man—rather than an Olympic runner—sprints full speed, clutching a briefcase, like a businessman in desperate pursuit. The number “1988” carved onto the muscular forearm, combined with the image of a man racing to avoid falling behind in the endless competition for survival, serves as a metaphorical critique of a society that demands one’s full bodily energy in the name of success, as if life itself were a sport.
After studying in Germany following his second solo show, Lee returned to Korea and held a pivotal exhibition in 2000 at the Moran Museum of Art titled BOTH SIDES OF EXISTENCE. There, he presented works that differed entirely from his previous figure sculptures. Yet the underlying intention remained consistent: to integrate opposing elements—reality and shadow, light and darkness, fullness and emptiness—within a single piece. This exhibition marked an important turning point, signaling the development of his Inverted Sculpture into its current form.
The Freezing of Time
After his second solo exhibition, Lee Yong Deok went to study abroad in Berlin—at a time when, even after German reunification, the legacy of the Berlin Wall still lingered. In the autumn of 1994, at a Berlin flea market, he came across an old group photograph. It captured a class of thirty-three first-grade boys and their teacher, taken on October 24, 1920. On the back of the photograph were inscribed the words “kl. k. 7d,” the date of the photo, and the names of the children in it. The year 1920 marked just one year after the collapse of the German Empire, which had been defeated in World War I, and the establishment of the Weimar Republic under the leadership of the Social Democratic Party. These boys were born during, or just before, the outbreak of the war, and had grown up amid wartime famine and disease. After the photograph was taken, they would have witnessed a period of chaos, in which radical left- and right-wing factions struggled for control of the country. By the time these children reached the age of twenty, in 1933, the National Socialist German Workers' Party—the Nazis—had come to power through legal means. How many of the boys in that photograph were later conscripted into the war launched by Hitler’s Third Reich? By the time Lee discovered the photograph in 1994, those boys, if still alive, would have been in their eighties. This innocent question leads us to recall Susan Sontag’s observation that photography carries a fundamental nostalgia. She wrote that “what is beautiful in a photograph is already aged, decayed, or no longer exists,” and that “to photograph is to participate in another person’s (or thing’s) mortality, vulnerability, mutability.” Thus, every photograph heralds something that is already dead—or a death that is imminent: memento mori.[8] Roland Barthes, too, connected the essence of photography to death.
“What I aim for in a photo in which I appear is, in fact, death. Death is the eidos—the very essence—of photography. (…) To me, the photographer’s representative organ is not the eye (the eye frightens me) but the finger. The finger is the trigger of the lens, linked to the metallic glide of the plate (when the camera still used glass plates).”[9]
So when Lee Yong Deok discovered that group photo of children, was it the shadow of death that he recognized in the worn image? Surely, given the passage of time, many of those children would no longer be alive. More likely, what Lee perceived in the photograph was the inescapable destiny of the photographic medium itself: as Sontag described, the way photography freezes a moment in time, thereby revealing the merciless passage of time. What he sensed—just as much in the photograph as in the sculptural reproduction of the children—was the emotion of nostalgia.
Upon acquiring the photograph, Lee Yong Deok meticulously recreated the faces of the boys in life-size plaster. He faithfully reproduced the expressions of the children as they appeared in the image—some sullen, some curious, others seemingly frightened, as if sensing the harsh and ominous times ahead. The realistic rendering of their expressions in sculpture evokes a sense of foreboding. In these expressions, I am reminded of punctum. The concept of studium and punctum as a way of interpreting photographs was proposed by Roland Barthes. He described punctum, a Latin word meaning “point,” as a “sting, speck, cut, little hole,” even a “dice throw.”[10] Just as Barthes wrote that punctum is “what pierces me,” “what rises from the scene, shoots out of it like an arrow, and wounds me,” the old photograph Lee found seems to have struck him in a similar way—wounding him with the passage of time, while also summoning the frozen moment of the photograph into the “here and now.” I, too, am drawn to the power and pull of the faded group photo displayed alongside the 33 sculpted boys, and feel a pang of discomfort in the downcast or fearful gazes of the children—whether captured in the photograph or cast in Lee’s sculptures.
In the original photo, the boys are neither dressed in uniform nor strictly arranged. Yet Lee rendered their clothing as if they had been dressed in standardized military uniforms. The terracotta bodies of the children appear nearly identical, as though cast from the same mold. Onto these uniform torsos, he assembled uniquely modeled plaster heads, then lined them up in a single row. Thus, the 33 boys—some seated on the floor or on steps, others standing in the back row in the photograph—now all stand at attention, frozen in place as if in military drill, dressed in dark uniforms. The expressions of the children and the faded black-and-white tone of the photo together create a powerful impression. In Lee’s kl.k.7d.24.10.1920 Berlin, the individuality of each child is replaced by a somber collective portrait of totalitarian homogeneity. Uniforms, rigid posture, and regimented rows symbolize discipline, control, and absolute order. Through this work, did the artist intend to evoke the terror these children would soon experience under Nazi fascism? Under the Nazi regime, schools instilled German nationalism and trained children to uphold the virtues of the “model citizen,” turning them into loyal future soldiers of racial cleansing who would be sent off to the front lines. To interpret Lee Yong Deok’s sculpture as an invitation to reflect on collective memory and historical context is to engage with what Barthes called the studium of the work. Barthes described studium—from the Latin meaning “zeal” or “dedication”—as the general field of cultural interest, or the mental engagement and goodwill of the viewer. He argued that studium belongs to the realm of culture and is associated with a moderate emotional response, one that is earnest but not intense. To recognize the studium in an image is to encounter the photographer’s intention.[11] This does not mean, however, that studium is subordinate to punctum. Because studium is where we find the cultural and referential codes embedded in a work, it allows us to recall the horrors of collectivism through Lee’s piece.
Through the sculpture of 33 boys standing in a row, we are made to see time itself, frozen. At one point, Lee stated, “I try to capture moments in people’s lives before they vanish into the past, in order to preserve that moment forever.” By sculpting from an old photograph, he brings memory—both past and present—into three-dimensional form. In 1997, the year he completed his Meisterschüler program at the Berlin University of the Arts, Lee presented this work in a solo exhibition at the Berlin Schulmuseum.
The motif of frozen time reappears in narcissus' lake 001281, a work Lee Yong Deok unveiled at his 2000 solo exhibition at the Moran Museum of Art, held upon his return to Korea. The piece evokes Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man, a Renaissance drawing inspired by Vitruvian principles, which presents the idea of the human being as a microcosm of the universe. Based on Vitruvius’s architectural theory and his own anatomical studies, da Vinci illustrated that when a person stands upright with arms extended horizontally, the body fits within a square, and when the arms are raised overhead with legs spread, it aligns with the circumference of a circle. This idealized proportional drawing gives the impression that da Vinci may have used his own body, mirrored and posed in this manner, as a basis for a self-portrait. By contrast, the figure in narcissus' lake 001281 lies face down on a circular disc, arms extended outward. Rather than depicting an idealized proportion, the posture suggests a state of surrender, as if the body were on the verge of being pulled into the dark stillness of the water—like a black hole. In order to express the suspended instant in which the figure comes into contact with the shallow surface of water that fills the low-lying disc, the artist suspends the body in midair. While the expression of the face is not visible, the figure’s casual clothing—ordinary T-shirt and trousers—suggests that this may be a self-portrait.
The work captures, as if with a high-speed camera, the precise moment just before the plummeting body touches the water. In this way, it depicts a frozen instant in which velocity and gravity appear to have halted—a moment in which time itself seems to freeze. And yet, at the instant the falling man sees his reflection in the surface of the water, he encounters not merely a physical reflection of himself, but a foreign presence made visible by the water-as-mirror. The water does not simply reflect; it gazes back. In that fleeting moment, the man becomes not the subject who sees, but the object who is seen. Thus, he experiences his own appearance in the world as it is perceived from the outside. Facing the water, he simultaneously sees and is seen—opening the possibility of recognizing himself anew. The moment in which the subject is fully exposed is one of suspended time, yet this does not imply that time has stopped. Rather, in this moment, the boundary between past and present collapses and the two temporally overlap. What we perceive is not a concluded pause, but a distilled fragment of continuous time—an abstraction that allows us to experience the dynamic nature of time itself.
The Transplantation or Continuity of Time
The title and theme of Lee Yong Deok’s 2024 solo exhibition at Total Museum of Contemporary Art was The Persistence of the Moment: THE MOMENT NOT A MOMENT. This phrase evokes Henri Bergson’s notion of pure duration. In contrast to science’s spatialized concept of time as something that can be mathematically measured, Bergson emphasized time as creation. He wrote, “The more we strive to grasp the nature of time, the more we understand that duration is invention, the creation of form, the continuous production of something absolutely new.”[12] Lee’s idea of the “duration of the instant” is not a nostalgic longing for an irretrievable past, but a preservation of memory that remains alive—a time that endures, and as such, connects directly with Bergson’s concept of time as ongoing invention. Lee’s own words affirm this: “I want my works to preserve the past so that fading figures can remain with us—forever present.” In this sense, time is a crucial element in Lee Yong Deok’s work.
Traditionally, the visual arts have been defined by spatial elements—point, line, plane, form, color, texture—thus relegating time to a secondary role. In the stillness of sculpture, time manifests through the element of movement, particularly implied movement. If visual art condenses time into space, then literature, performance, and film—constructed through the sequential flow of time—are considered temporal arts. This distinction was explored by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, who theorized the differences between visual and literary arts by focusing on their respective media. Challenging Johann Joachim Winckelmann’s reading of the Laocoön, Lessing proposed that painting captures a single moment in visual space, while poetry unfolds action in time, through successive narrative. He emphasized the distinction between the two art forms: one reveals action as a sequence of visible parts extended over time, the other presents a visible but static action revealed all at once in space.[13] To support this argument, Lessing explained why Laocoön’s expression of pain was restrained. He claimed that “painting, because its signs and symbols can only be combined spatially, must renounce the expression of temporal sequence; thus, continuous action cannot be its domain. Painting must limit itself to spatial action—in other words, to a single gesture—through which the viewer must infer the rest.”[14]He introduced the term the pregnant moment, asserting that because painting is confined to a single moment, it must select the most meaningful one—“a moment from which both the past and future can be understood.”[15] He continued, “The visual artist can capture only a single moment from nature’s ceaseless change, and the painter must observe this moment from a single perspective.” However, since a work of art is not meant to be seen just once but reflected upon over time, “the chosen moment must be the richest in meaning and expression.”[16] Lessing’s efforts provided a clear theoretical distinction between the media-specific characteristics of literature and visual art. Still, his Laocoön was ultimately written in response to Winckelmann’s rediscovery of the aesthetic values of Greek sculpture. Where Winckelmann celebrated plastic beauty, Lessing sought to elevate literary beauty, advocating for the supremacy of literature by investigating its essential qualities in contrast to those of visual art.[17]
As Lessing argued, the experience of time in painting or sculpture may indeed be confined to a specific moment. In sculpture especially, time tends to be presented in a compressed form. Yet to view a sculpture in the round, the observer must not only contemplate it as a whole but also—inevitably—move around it. One must see it from multiple angles and heights, from near and far. This voluntary motion, too, entails the passage of time.
However, the temporality that Lee Yong Deok perceives goes beyond Lessing’s notion of the “pregnant moment.” A clear indication that his interest lies as much in time as in space can be found in his Inverted Sculptures, which articulate temporal continuity. Consider the following excerpt from his working notes:
“All objects possess—or generate—their own unique time zone. When a material that exists within a specific time zone and its image become linked in the human mind through a relationship of ‘transplantation,’ this allows for the mutual transference of the two time zones, through which a state of reciprocal reversibility is instilled—where the material is no longer independent.”[18]
His working notes reveal that time—an element typically considered extrinsic to sculpture—is in fact essential to his practice. The key term that emerges here is transplantation. On this, Lee writes, “The movement of time is another name for transplantation.”[19] He explains that “time, as an idea perceived by the human mind, cannot exist independently. Time must come into contact with space, and space is filled with matter. However, each time zone does not exist in isolation, but under conditions transplanted from another.” To me, what he calls transplantation suggests a form of parallelism and penetration through displacement—a means of defamiliarization, akin to the surrealist notion of dépaysement, or “being placed in an unfamiliar environment.” To understand this idea more concretely, we should turn to one of his works.
I am not expensive, exhibited at the 2008 Singapore Biennale, is a large Inverted Sculpture measuring seven meters wide. Created using aluminum panels, fiberglass, urethane paint, and neon lighting, it depicts four distinct scenes set against the background of Potsdamer Platz, the symbolic site of German division and reunification. Located roughly one kilometer south of the Brandenburg Gate and the German Reichstag, Potsdamer Platz was one of Europe’s busiest intersections from the 9th century to the early 20th, before being completely destroyed during World War II. During the Cold War, the Berlin Wall split the square in two, turning it into a kind of no-man’s-land. After the Wall was first opened on November 9, 1989, it was dismantled beginning May 15, 1990, and all border controls between East and West Berlin were abolished by July 1. While preparing for a large-scale charity concert organized by Roger Waters of Pink Floyd to commemorate the end of division, remnants of Nazi-era infrastructure were discovered in the square on July 21 of that same year. During Lee’s years in Berlin, this derelict and abandoned site—once shunned even by locals—transformed into one of the most desirable locations in Europe. Daimler-Benz launched a major development project there, followed by Sony establishing its European headquarters. Witnessing this transformation, Lee responded to the Singapore Biennale’s invitation by creating a work that transplanted Korea’s ongoing division into the symbolic space of Potsdamer Platz.
Each of the four panels in the work presents an independent scene, yet they are linked through their shared spatial context. The first panel on the left shows a man and woman dancing in an embrace—an inverted sculptural depiction of a scene the artist once observed at that location. The second panel features the back view of a mother carrying a child on her back, again rendered in negative relief. Surrounding tourists and children also appear in the third panel, which features a boy in a short-sleeved shirt standing near a vintage blue car—likely a model of a 1950s-era Mercedes-Benz. In the final panel, a disheveled boy sits atop a box. Behind him, a woman walks by, partially obscuring a girl who appears to be holding hands with someone. These four sequences transplant different moments in time into a single space. The present-day dancers in the first panel overlap temporally with the tourists and passersby seen throughout the panels, yet their time conflicts with that of the woman carrying a child, the vintage car, and the seated boy. This raises the question: What is the relationship between this site—Potsdamer Platz—and the figures portrayed in these inverted scenes? Particular attention should be given to the boy in the final panel. Dressed in worn clothes and rubber shoes, he appears to be a war orphan from the Korean War, symbolizing the trauma of conflict. Sitting on a U.S. aid box, his vacant stare is directed toward the dancing couple in the first panel—his gaze becoming the thread that links the four sequences together. The way his fingers gently press together as his hands rest in his lap forms the punctum of this work. That gesture, along with the boy’s gaze, pierces through the disparate scenes and prompts the viewer to contemplate the deeper meaning of the place. These four disparate events—dancing lovers, a woman with a child, a vintage car, a war orphan—unexpectedly enter the rhythm of the city, defying the irreversibility of time and merging past and present. This merging is made possible through transplantation. For Lee, transplantation is a way of restoring space and time through memory. He describes the act of transplanting memory as “grasping time”—and thus, “grasping the present.” To reveal things that are absent yet present, or present yet absent, he composes his panels through the dual techniques of intaglio and relief. In doing so, he stages uncanny juxtapositions and temporal disjunctions, reversing time’s unidirectional flow to bring memory into the present. These gestures draw viewers toward the work. And then we realize—the figures and car that once seemed to protrude are in fact illusions created by hollowed, concave spaces. The title i am not expensive offers a clue for how to reconstruct the temporal identity of the site. It beckons us to recall the memory of war embedded within this place.
The strange juxtapositions of space and figures across temporal gaps, along with the combined use of relief and intaglio, can also be found in i am still here, a triptych Lee Yong Deok presented at the 2008 Seville Biennale in Spain. In the first panel, the tiled courtyard evokes a Joseon-era palace, yet a contemporary woman’s back appears there, suddenly and incongruously, accompanied by a red cloth fluttering above her like a flag—clearly revealing the technique of dépaysement. In the second panel, a woman sits idly on a bench at a train station. Next to her, a woman in stark contrast is dressed in traditional hanbok, wearing a gache wig and holding a fan in her lap. The contrast between them is as dramatic as the one between monochrome and red. The young woman, suggesting a modern traveler, is painted in grayscale, while the traditionally dressed figure is rendered in inverted relief—bringing together flatness and volume, relief and intaglio, the contemporary and the historical within a single frame. In the final panel, a woman wearing loose-fitting monpe trousers—Japanese-style workwear from the colonial period—and rubber shoes appears on a European street. This figure is based on a well-known photograph from the Korean War, recreated here in inverted relief. The original image shows a woman searching for her family among the 300 corpses of civilians who had been suffocated in a cave in Hamhung, then exhumed by UN forces on October 19, 1950, and lined up on the street. Covering her nose against the stench of death, the woman’s devastated posture is a raw representation of war’s brutality. The red fabric fluttering in the sky in the first panel corresponds to the skirt of the feudal noblewoman seated gracefully in the second panel, just as the green-toned body of the woman in the hoodie walking away in the first panel echoes the woman in the third—covering her nose with one hand, the other braced against her waist, paralyzed by sorrow. This work summons both the time that has passed and the memories of those who lived through it, bringing them into the present. The space in which the present and past coexist becomes a threshold where time is transcended—a space where spirits may pass and imagination may dwell. The merging of unfamiliar places and historical time evokes the notion of transplantation, as described by the artist. The backdrop surrounding the figures—like a theatrical stage—resists any ordinary or easily decipherable narrative. Instead, it lures us into a labyrinth of stories.
As we have seen, in Lee Yong Deok’s works created through the method of transplantation, the norms of classicism, realism, and modernism—such as narrative unity, linear communication of meaning, and medium purity—are either ignored or discarded. The shift from the singular to the multiple is energized by leaps and hybrids. Movement, made possible through transplantation, opens up new domains of narrative. This is the generative force and allure of the Copernican shift in thought that Lee’s work seeks to achieve.
Returning to i am not expensive, we observe that the three-dimensional figures and vehicles, though placed against backgrounds rendered in shades of blue or grayscale, evoke a melancholic tone reminiscent of old photographs. The muted grays and pale blues create an elegiac mood. Yet, the sorrow stirred by the passage of time is not frozen in death. Through the inverted relief technique, in which the image appears as a concave space that transforms into volume through the viewer’s movement, time becomes not static but continuous. It invites us to experience not a rupture in time, but its ongoing flow and interaction. The achromatic palette suggests that these events inhabit the same temporal dimension. Still, the visual fragmentation, juxtaposition, and disorientation caused by the transplantation of different times only serve to highlight temporal continuity more intensely. Each sequence captures a specific moment, yet—as with Bergson’s concept of qualitative time—they are shown to be interconnected. Ultimately, the viewer realizes that while each sequence possesses its own temporal rhythm, they come together to form a singular, cohesive experience. Through Lee Yong Deok’s work, I am reminded that time is not something to be thought, but something to be perceived through experience. To me, Lee is not a sculptor who shapes form, but an artist who sculpts time.
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About the Contributor :
Choi Tae-Man majored in painting at the College of Fine Arts and Graduate School of Seoul National University and earned a PhD in art history from Dongguk University. He worked as a curator at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art and as an assistant professor at Seoul National University of Technology (now SeoulTech) before joining the Department of Fine Arts at Kookmin University in 2003, where he is currently a professor.
Since debuting as an art critic in 1984, he has published numerous critical essays and contributed research papers to various academic journals. He has served as artistic director of the 2004 Busan Biennale and the 2014 Changwon Sculpture Biennale, as well as president of the Korean Society of Art Theories and the Korean Association of Modern and Contemporary Art History. Additionally, he served as Executive Director of the Busan Biennale. His major publications include Art and the City, Art and Revolution, A Study on the History of Modern Korean Sculpture, and Art and Social Imagination, among others.
[1] The artist originally produced the work in 2004 as a series of four separate panels, but in 2012, he re-created and exhibited a new version that integrates all four actions within a single frame.
[2] Herbert Read, What Is Sculpture? An Inquiry into Its Historical and Theoretical Meaning, trans. Hee-Sook Lee (Seoul: Yeolhwadang, 2001), 95.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Lee Yong Deok, “Transplant,” in DEPTH OF SHADOW: Lee Yong Deok (Exhibition Catalogue), The National Art Museum of China, 2005, 21.
[5] Choi Tae-Man “Reconsidering the Passion and Abstract Impulse in Ryu In’s Work,” Korean Art History of Portraiture, 2019, 203–230.
[6] Young Seok Yoon, “Ideological Manifestation of the Everyday: Emerging Sculptor Lee Yong Deok,” Misoolsegye, no. 11 (1988): 70–72.
[7] Choi Tae-Man “Reception of Contradictions and Assimilation of Ego to the Imaginary World,” in DEPTH OF SHADOW: Lee Yong Deok (Exhibition Catalogue), 178.
[8] Susan Sontag, “In Plato’s Cave,” in On Photography(New York: Delta Books, 1977), 15.
[9] Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Gwang Hee Cho (Seoul: Yeolhwadang, 1986), 21–22.
[10] Ibid., 32.
[11] Ibid., 32–33.
[12] Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution, trans. Hwa Choi (Seoul: Jayoomungo, 2020), 39.
[13] Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Laocoön: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry, trans. Ellen Frothingham (Boston: Robert Brothers, 1887), 90.
[14] Ibid.
[15] Ibid., 16–17.
[16] Ibid., 16.
[17] Dae Kwon Kim, “Drawing the Boundary between Literature and Visual Art: On Lessing’s Laocoön and Herder’s Critical Forests, Part I,”Goethe Studies (Korean Goethe Society), 2006, 153–154.
[18] Lee Yong Deok, DEPTH OF SHADOW: Lee Yong Deok (Exhibition Catalogue), 19.
[19] Ibid., 19.