Lee Yong Deok artist’s writing
2011
Transplantation and Identity
Nearly all of us find our death bed a hundred miles away from our birth place. It has been the incessant part of human stories that we move to other places, pick up life at a different environment, and continue to live on; we transfer and transplant ourselves. The actual way people live their lives is analogous to creolization; one thing weaves itself into another. How much of ‘me’ is purebred? How much are others different from me? My works bear reference to such queries that have the value of devaluing dichotomies; I am sceptical about the definite boundary between two different states. Usually, we are far more comfortable in demarcating a concrete boundary to emphasize definite portions. However, in reality, the boundary is a continuum of time as our thoughts and feelings are either spliced or synthesized to composite something new.
Yet at the same time, against the aoristic combination in reality, we also wish to perceive something that is coherently intrinsic: the identity.
The identity, on one level, might be a self-reading of jointed transitions, smoothing out the creases at the seam, reconciling the irreconcilables, or acknowledging the unexpected newness that had grown and cultivated upon one being transplanted into the other. It sounds solid and consistent, as if the self pursued his or her own identity with an air of predetermination. Once your identity bears the iconic meaning of yourself, you feel as if the juncture of connection and divergence has been erased, or at least that it is not important any more.
Nonetheless, it cannot be denied that the identity is treacherously amorphous. What comprises of ‘me’ can compose ‘others’ by different and unrepeatable combinations as seen in the work Lots of Me (1995). The word ‘uniqueness’ or what we perceive to be authentic portion of something, has fragility.
What interests me is the fact that the confluence of multiple elements takes up time and space in the real world, which has indeterminate borders. The boundary, so to speak, tends to be a tract where the various elements of life indefatigably clash, interact and yield changes. In Transplant (1997), I move soil from Korea to various places, and as the piled sediments on top of each other in respective hierarchy fall through the funnel little by little – probably the finer grit first and the bigger, stubborn stones will be pushed down by the torrent of rain. Then they are infused with the earth of each of the places allowing greenery to grow in the new soil. Such a change is not accompanied by a singular stroke of instantaneity. One can traverse the realm of the boundary; we are tingled with the sensations of watching overlapped images of many scenes. My artistic concern is to shine a beam of light onto the tract that is on a bed of changing and wavering notes.