Lee Yong Deok artist’s note
2011

“It Was Just There”

I often think of the imagery of the world as something you cannot pin down – something you cannot frame by words. However explicitly political and historical it might be, the elusive nature of history and its remembrance seems to compel from me the desire to encompass the un-framable. In this vein, my work is like a perpetual love affair with the indeterminate called reality.

Sometimes the reality is crisp clear, or perhaps you want to believe that it has certain logic to be interpreted by. This may come probably from the unconscious need to affirm your own beliefs; affirmation is really an old human habit. At other times, things seem mad, indescribable and hard-core resistant against being analyzed. And also, you might be able to ‘capture’ the moment of truth – yet only with the baffling mix of distrust and suspension; distrust of what you see and suspension of what comprises your own thoughts and sensibilities.

In the midst of such indecisive tangle, I dwell on the essence of being – maybe I am drawn toward the relative simplicity that constitutes the Being. The human figures in my work have gorgeously clear and precise shapes as if they came straight out of their optimal state from films or photographs. At the same time, the-state-of-the-art-ness is, in close quarters, feebly crumbled to the opposite. I see them both – the fractional existence of being which is only determined and restricted by time and space, and its simple and nondescript essence which is humbly balanced upon the relations to the in and about of human beings.

The fractional existence is almost to the point of being bleached; the works presented to this exhibition in Belgium are under the beam of light which fills the space. “It was just there”, one would be tempted to comment, as he tries to retrieve the blurring or even already vanishing presence of being. These figures echo the mute subjected-ness to the spatial elements. I feel their existence only momentarily.