Acutely aware of the heels of my shoes crunching against the wooden floor and making a Cagean noise in the quiet gallery as I walk, Lee Yong-Deok and I were waiting for the reporter from the Straits Times to come to the second floor gallery at Singapore Art Museum (SAM). It was in November 2008 when Lee’s works were featured both at the Singapore Biennale and the Korean contemporary art exhibition titled Korean Art: Modernism and Beyond at SAM. Lee Yong-Deok was unable to attend the previews for both events; he came a couple weeks after the opening of the show. The Straits Times wanted to interview him; his inverted sculpture had ranked as one of the most often visited art works at the Singapore Biennale. The reporter, Deepika Shetty arrived soon with a camera staff. She had a congenial look and gentle smile – thank god for that, as I was secretly intimidated by the presence of a female art/culture professional or practitioner who adorned a swanky and expensively-artistic exterior. I was relieved however, as she started her interrogation with an ever so disarming phrase.

 

“Oh you know what my daughter said after we all saw your work at the Biennale?” It was not a question but an invitation. She was starting with a kind of random, quotidian artistry of conversation while we – at least I was – were ready to smoke the usual with aesthetic proxy.  Here and there   our unusual ideas and insights had shot off, and the first thing we were ready to do was to re-compose an explanation of Lee’s own artistic experience according to something common and easy.  Art is only completed in the experience of others, taking flight from the artist’s besotted heart. Both Lee and I feigned a larger-than-life curiosity without feeling terribly guilty.

 

“She said, she just turned eleven, ‘Mama, someone has been in there just before, hasn’t it? He has just walked out of it, I know.’” The mother beamed with pride and at the same time, self-satisfaction. It was a charming opening of the interview.

 

Lee said smiling, “That’s exactly it. I thought the same when I made it – I made the fact that someone was there, and also the fact that someone is not there, into a sculpture.  Your daughter has seen it both, that’s brilliant. It’s more of how you feel about vestiges of what has been, rather than the figurative shape itself.” 

 

The first exchange of her question and his answer seemed to be so effortlessly to the point that it eclipsed the rest of the interview. It would be near nonsense if you say you could see two opposing phenomenon at the same time -  for instance, it would be akin to saying that you can perceive both the vertical motion of a ball that is being thrown upwards inside a moving train, and the parabolic motion of the ball which the viewer at the outside of the train would perceive. With Lee Yong-Deok’s sculpture, the viewer can court the two paradoxical experiences with legitimate pleasure. The little girl’s first impression of Lee Yong-Deok’s inverted sculpture is, for sure, exact words to describe how his work primarily touches us. The inverted image has touched the sculptor’s vision and perception; the depression of an image, in a state of subtle equipoise between momentary epiphany and its evaporation, oddly bears down on us.

 

In spring 2009, while Lee Yong-Deok was fairly busy preparing for his solo show scheduled in September, I met him again in his studio in Korea. 

 

KATE: You have always sculpted something about the negative throughout your artistic career. Could you tell me a little about your inverted sculptures? 

 

LYD: The resulting negative shape in my inverted sculpture is so self-evidently speaking of the negative, but, to me, my sculptures represent the positive-ness of the incorporeal negative, and the seamless coagulation of antagonistic perceptions. My inverted sculptures are something that came to me while I guess I was still coming to grips with finding a solution to the different modes of existence or the threshold of different perceptions. However, I don’t want you to think that it came chronologically after a sequential train of logical thoughts – they are not stacked up one by one, one after the other. At some point, all of a sudden, the totality of loss and gain, or subjection and reinterpretation, hit me as real. If we were to think of the negative first; the negative is in fact nothing new to the sculptors. It is the husk you see every time when you cast an object. Strictly speaking, it is a given. A ‘given’ in that the positive is, so to speak, grafted onto the negative, and vice versa. Because in the casting, the negative and the positive interface with each other. 

 

KATE: But this doesn’t mean that the negative is the same as these inverted sculptures.

 

LYD: No, it does not, you’re right about that. With the positive and the negative, you take part in it without really seeing it. It is probably because we become blinded by the transfiguration, that is, the resulting positive that has arrived in the sculptor’s hands. The focal point of the traditional way of making sculpture is the creation of a form, either by carving or casting.  As for my method, one could say that a form emerges from the matter by eliminating the space around the outside of the object. Like this…

 

Lee Yong-Deok grabbed a piece of paper nearby while gesticulating, and drew what looked like a diagram of …. The area which the dotted line enclosed meant to be the material to be chipped away. 

 

                                      [ Diagram 1 ]    

KATE: Oh I see. What you say reminds me of Michelangelo’s Slaves. It feels as if the figure had not been fully released from the material itself – rather, the body or existence is still submerged.

 

LYD: Yes, I suppose you could feel that way since it is an unfinished work, I mean, the sculptor did not entirely carve off the outside. As I said before however, the focus then was on  positive figuration, by the process of sculpting away the space around the body. In comparison, I started with what was around the positive, that is, around the empty cavity. 

 

While explaining, he drew another diagram just next to the previous one. That was simple enough. You can see the shape of a pocket either by pulling it inside out, or, by peering into it. 

 

                                    [ Diagram 2 ] – two side by side

My eyes were busy running over the two sketches, rather amazed to see the ideas embodied in such skeletal schematization. Lee Yong-Deok continued.

 

 LYD: In my inverted sculpture, the space around the negative husk is materialized. Whereas the method of the traditional sculpture is in alignment with the way how the object exists in this world, my method is to spell out what is on the reverse register of actual existence. 

 

KATE: So, in other words, the relation between the object and the surrounding space has been subverted in your work. 

 

LYD: Yes, the sculpted positive is superseded by a scraped-out hollowness. However, I am not interested in subversion itself. Overturning one concept and riding on an antipodean wave sounds ludic to me. The materialized space around the void not simply changed the correlation between the positive and the negative, but had the effect of pushing the perimeters of the work farther off. 

 

The empty pit, that is, the negative, literally indicates that the sculptural shape un-exists; it talks about the absence. Yet, the absence is made to look like the positive – only momentarily from a certain angle and a certain distance. Similarly, from this certain angle and certain distance, one can take a glimpse of the negative  transfiguring into the positive, as if one sees a moment out of the thousands of moments of water turning into ice. The work has a fluid interior. 

 

KATE: You mean to say that there is a trajectory, starting from the negative, that is, the emptiness, then the notion of absence… then some kind of tangible feeling…then…?

 

LYD: Yes. In a way, the idea that  absence is linked to its opposite came quite naturally to me. I was thinking of the negative as something that is capable of telling you about what has existed. I cannot help mentioning here a reference to the Eastern concept of the nothingness which alludes to there being something, or Being, or Existence. Apart from  Eastern philosophy, is it not true that you can more vividly capture the essence of the object in its absence than when it is there with you? It is one of our many lived experiences.

 

KATE: Well, I suppose it is true. It reminds me of the phrase from Merleau-Ponty’s writing. He said  that a painter is analogous to a writer in love who thinks of the absent woman. The absence of the woman probably makes him think more deeply of her and describe her in crystallized words. 

 

LYD:  Exactly. The absence is grafted onto the involuntary presence of the object that is not there, and furthermore, certain truthful qualities are filtered out of the absent object. It is from here that my inverted sculpture was incubated and evolved. Accepting this overlap, I could finally abandon the positive all together. This abandonment was not there from the beginning for me. In my earlier works, I deliberately retained both the negative and the positive in one body. Back then, the negative was essentially derivative, and was not able to generate something else. But, the materialized space around the impalpable negative effortlessly makes the viewer perceive the correlation between absence and presence. Art fundamentally reaps from the viewer’s experience of the artwork. The viewers, in front of the inverted sculpture, rock back and forth, trying to capture what is projected onto their inner eyes, that is, the intimate, familiar positive images. Then another moment they realize there is nothing. When coming back to see the positive images, viewers are aware that they are experiencing an illusionistic field and, well, hopefully they find the truth is there at their feet.

 

KATE: So your work vacillates between the two. I sense that in general, the sculpture has the immanence of being a definite form. Your inverted sculpture is deformed at close quarters, and turned into a definitive form only from a certain angle. What makes you compelled to formulate such an oscillation? Is it not  representation at the suicide of the sculptural norm? 

 

LYD: [laughs] Well, ‘the representation at the suicide of the sculptural norm’ is an excellent title for my future exhibition. And that is not far from the truth! I was telling you something about the overlap of  absence and presence. Do you think there is a demarcation between the two in reality? Exactly when does something begin to appear or disappear? Here, you can see that the aspect of time demands its own share in all  human affairs and the business of nature as well.   Talking of  change from one state to another in general, can you pinpoint the exact moment of a change in the continuum of time? Nothing in reality ever stands still. However hard you fractionize time in order to take a singular moment meaningful for the phenomenon, it is impossible to break one moment from the chain of time. 

 

KATE: Yes, I agree. It’s on the causal relations that I most acutely feel  helplessness. I mean, exactly when is the cause of something and the result of something else? In my private insane imagination, the historian is the one who has more heartache than the novelist. If you could go and ask Time of the really significant ‘juncture’ out of her whole constitutes, she would give you a brute answer: ‘there is no such thing in my regime’.  

 

LYD: I find that aspects of the material world to be fundamentally different from the realm of the human mind. In order to understand and also operate in the real world, the human mind needs to form definite boundaries onto the infinite, unbreakable world; the boundaries that cater to make it easier and more convenient for humans to handle the complexity and fluidity of the material world. This is veering into a non-artistic territory. I like to see things that are at the outside of the realm of art. I personally think that the more the artist looks outside of his studio, the better it is for art. Art has to look at how other areas of society regard the world – it’s the research, the artist’s research. Somehow the artist should have a perspective with which to see what is seen in the world. There is this tension both abstract and concrete between the world and you, and to me, art is something you can spell out while coming to terms with that strain. 

 

Now, coming back to my work, it’s the tension between  reality and the general concepts that are based upon such reality that makes my work unable to rest on a determined form, if  ‘determined form’ is the right word for it…You talked of the juncture a while ago, of the impossibility of tweezing out a moment of the moments. At the most, in changes of the phenomenal world, the border is a tract, and I have to wander around there. One of my early works, Confrontation-Itinerary (2000) dealt with exploring the border by exploring the outline of the human body. My interest in the marginal territory where two different events or phenomena are incubated and taking place, is also reflected in the work Transplant (1997) and Lots of Me (1995), albeit with its focus on the issue of one’s identity. The question is, where does art come in?   

 

We are within this system – the conceptualization is sought to understand the complexities, and yet it has this inability to fully explain things.

 

LYD: Having the general concepts to comprehend the diverse reality, is both a strength and weakness. However close it might be to the concrete empirical observation, a crucial essence would slip away, and at the same time, however perfect the general concept might be, it would not be omnipotent.   

 

KATE: It sounds very much that the truth seems to be somewhere between abstract construction and the flotsam and jetsam of details… it suddenly reminds me of the total meaninglessness of being close-by to your sculptures, and the arresting succinctness of the distance. 

 

LYD: Oh, does it? My own work suddenly gets too near towards me, or much too objectified. I always think I’d better stand in-between.

 

We both laughed. I often feel that I take possession of something essential when I get to the marrow of art. It is almost a consummate feeling. It is through something elusive (some logic or sentiment?) that resists being interpreted.  I explore something real, an experience that is really enigmatic, if it can be called an aesthetic experience. I mean, through a tacit suspension, I access the truth and some kind of power that the artwork has evinced in the artist; this gives me a thief’s conscience and simultaneously an exhilaration… 

 

KATE: I would like to talk about the motif of your work – the people, they are paused in mid-movement as in the still images of film. Is it related to the ephemeral?    

 

LYD: Well, not quite. I am aware that a big chunk of the contemporary art trend deals with the transient aspects of life.  It’s kind of making a complaint against time, for as soon as time mercilessly marches on forwards, all that richness, full of emotion and memory, crumbles away. But that’s not my focal point. I am interested in how people remember things under the sovereign power of Time, how things are remembered because of the very ephemeral trait. I think that things are always wrapped around with the time of the present .  

 

He paused a few moments, as if to see if his own wording suited his own ideas

 

LYD: The images of the people are what I take in about them at the very moment I see them, by which I mean, their present-ness. Whatever they were and whatever they would have been all point to the present time. So I capture and record the present-ness of the people. And I even call it their fragmentary  identity – a momentary something that  is remembered, something that is still nevertheless quite substantial about them. Because the momentariness is what you understand, detached from the actual heaviness of life and the world.     

 

KATE: Do you use photos when you make them?

 

LYD: I like taking random photographs of people, and sometimes I make use of other photos. There is a kind of affinity between me and photos in general – I think of the photo as the record of the photographer’s intentions and the feelings of the moment when it was photographed. The final images developed on the surface of the photo are the resultant configurations beneath which the photographer believed to imprint the weight of his or her own way to observe it. Whenever you see the photo, you see past the copy of the images – because you try to find when you photographed it, how you felt at that moment, etc. The photo in essence is the ghost form of the present that has past. A photo retains the images but it loses the image’s present-ness. In other words, we take photo of a moment in order not to lose it, only to lose it. It sounds funny, and a photo is one of those things that tell you most vividly about how we are obsessed with the present, how we are vulnerable to the present.  

 

KATE: What you mentioned bears reference to so-called ‘photographic death’. So then, does the way you capture people’s images in your sculpture resemble that of the photo?  

 

LYD:  No, rather, I think my sculpture is a kind of a statement of the meaning of the present-ness; about how we try to capture the present and how we interpret things from the present vintage point – how many times do we come across the text saying ‘…to observe it from a new perspective...’  The word, ‘new’ in this context means that ‘oh, we are fed up with the previous interpretation of whatever events glorious or disastrous, we want to read it from the ‘current’ viewpoint.’ I wanted to convey, through my sculpture, the absoluteness of all things pointing to the present time, and how it fleets again. The access to reality in itself is akin to wandering between the perennial elusiveness and the human’s persistency in seeking for what signifies now and here. 

 

KATE:  Conscious or not, we are constantly engaged in dialogue with the past. When you say that all the things are wrapped up with the present, it has the resonance of the same dialogue. It might sound a little childish, but I am tempted to say that the ‘dialogue’ could be centring on partial details or something more general.  I somehow think, there is, at the core of your work, a highly abstract element in a sense that your work does not have the downbeat political and social upfront that is trendy in the contemporary art. How do you regard your work in relation to the art trend of the contemporary artists?

 

LYD:  Well, I wonder how much this conversation will say anything real about my work, [laughs] the truth is out of my hands, and it will at the end of the day come to the person who reads it and what he conceives out of his own reading. All the same, one can’t help being oneself. I am not terribly keen on the method of taking up empirical observations and  concrete topical engagements. It probably would have been the same if I had taken up another profession. Some time ago a critic had asked me what exactly I was trying to tell through my work. The critic was purely puzzled. It was a moment both embarrassing and amusing. I hesitated to answer him, because it seemed too much to say, for instance, that my work is a kind of aesthetic tool to facilitate human perception towards the reality, and so on, even if it was actually the true answer. Would he have waited for me to spell out something more tangible and lucid? 

 

KATE: What was your answer? 

 

LYD: Language is so constraining, isn’t it? 

 

I agreed with him, only without saying it. Perhaps I will find his answer at other curated exhibition to come.