Lee Yong Deok artist’s note
2003

People Walking Series

From the artist’s notebook

People from different times and different places all congregate and exist in the present and in the art. What has been and what might have been is all dressed in the present time. Neither in plenitude nor in outrageous distortion does the past live in the present.

The frozen existence of individual figures is installed in each square block, poised on the ghostly crusts of whatever lies beneath or has been before; their habits, intentions, experiences and thoughts. Balanced on the razor’s edge of art, they have contacted me to take a stride from conception to formulation. They all collectively stare out at you; or at least they look so, on the verge of walking into the receded hemisphere of their own.

These boxes: people’s self-consciousness, people’s personas are melted into them like fossils into rocks. This single moment will forever ask us to restore them back, to slot them back to the sequence of time. And the box is a monogram of the absoluteness of people’s fleeting appearances that would stay in me and in the viewer’s mind as the perennial present. Its enigmatic beauty is the artist’s fodder; I look at the people and feel the rustling of the wrinkles on their clothes, the casual movement of walking, or the unaffected suspending of action. They all tacitly cipher and decipher what remains impregnated, simply unveiling the present.