Lee Yong Deok artist’s writing
2011

The Inverted Sculpture

Although my artistic concerns regarding inverted sculptures began around the same time as when I was working on my silhouette works and pieces like Nina’s Shadow, I only really began working on it in earnest in 2003.

In my note, “Reflections on the Silhouette”, I likened the silhouette works to an interrogation of the flat surface – the realm where the existence of the body resides on one side of it and the non-existence of the body lives on the other side. With the works on silhouettes, my focusing point was ‘the flat surface’ – the intersection of existence and non-existence – the reason being that the existence (and non-existence) of the object is reduced towards 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 the positive. If the interaction of light and darkness is removed, the residue of existence completely vanishes. I believe that whatever was beyond the existence of the silhouette undoubtedly existed. 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.

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, positively, existed. My inverted sculptures can be seen as analogous to bringing together the two different forms of existence in one body, in a way that the negative realm stays pivotal to what accentuates the our perceptive search; I am repudiating a notion of the 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. For example, take the instance of a pocket. When one peers into the inside of the pocket, it obscures the true form of the pocket, which could be easily perceived when it has been pulled inside out; only by taking a step back can one fully discern the form of the pocket. My inverted sculpture, at a snap, calls the attention of the viewers, to embrace its inversion upon its surrounding positive mass and thus abandoning the positive.