Lee Yong Deok artist’s writing
2011
From the Silhouette to the Inverted Sculpture
Earlier in my note, I likened the silhouette works to an interrogation of the flat surface – the realm where the silhouette images reside on the one hand and the existence of the three-dimensional vanishes on the other hand. In that note, my focusing point was ‘the flat surface’ which is the intersection of existence and non-existence, the reason being that the existence of the object is reduced to zero at a flat surface. Only certain set of conditions such as light and darkness, generates the formation of silhouettes – which can be felt as the super-thinly milled remains of existence, when observed with the eyes of a sculptor’s jest. With the interaction of light and darkness removed, the residue of existence completely vanishes. This means to say that the pair of the works, ‘Confrontation-Encounter’ slot into each other, but then, alas, as soon as this happens, the silhouette images will be all gone. Nonetheless, as one saw in ‘Confrontation’, whatever was beyond the silhouette, with my execution, undoubtedly exist.
It was this realm of the flat surface that my thoughts bent on. To my mind’s eye, its address, ‘the zero’ beyond which the silhouette disappears, could be the threshold of the existence of a negative accretion and that of a positive accumulation. Capitalizing on such a seemingly crude abstraction of perception, I thought that there would be a way to represent the flat surface as that of the threshold of the perceptive confound. Through my sculptural solution, I could resurrect the negative realm as something that substantially existed. That artistic solution of mine was tantamount to the electrification of a dead cell which commanded one fixed dimension of perception and then revive a kind of apparatus within the cell – to enable viewers to see the reality through two different frames of reference. If I explain my inverted sculptures in relation to the silhouette works, the inverted sculpture can be seen as analogous to bringing together the two different forms of the silhouette in one body, albeit the fact that the negative realm does not disappear; rather it stays pivotal to what accentuates the perceptive search; repudiating a notion of negative as a simple antithesis of the positive; rather, conceiving it as another verity that is accepted as substantial at the other side of the sphere.
What changed the negative doubt into another positive affirmation is, surprisingly, the way how people perceived the negative. They perceived it as the positive even if I suggested it as the negative! Although, it was with a proviso, ‘the distance’. With a certain distance between the inverted concave and the viewer, people almost automatically understood the negative chaotic mass as the representation of what they observe according to the normal positive order. This meant that they were willing to shift the criterion of the flat surface, by simply pacing a few steps backwards and thus adjusting their position. This ‘distance’ can be seen, in a broadest sense as aesthetic distance. I would prefer to call it ‘critical distance’. My inverted sculpture, at a snap, calls the attention of the viewers, instantly involving them in applying the manual of the tool that is used for reading the images. The manual tells the viewer to relegate the immediate chaos of the image that is ensconced in the cavity to the background, and suspect the work in a ‘distanced’ form, while adjusting one’s frame of reference. Then, bingo, one comes to the conclusion – and reads it as the positive.
[synchronicity] mixed media, 420x235x30cm, 2009