1)

BILJANA CIRIC: From the end of the eighties the works you produced like ‘Farewell’ (1985) and ‘Attraction of the Olympics’ (1988) are works you produced during your studies in Seoul. Can you talk about the social background of those works at that time, the issues that you tried to raise and their relation to Korea’s art scene and environment at that time?

 

LEE YONG-DEOK: To explain how I started as an art student and especially talk about the works I made before I went over to Berlin, I need to tell you briefly about the social milieu of the time in Korea – particularly, in the 1980s.

 

During my university years, the protest against the government dictatorship of the controversial president, Park Chung-Hee – whether on campus or out in the streets – was just part of the everyday scene. Things did not improve much even after the president’s assassination, and looking back, until the mid-1980s, the whole society was locked in the pains of democratization – because we were under yet again another military dictator. 

 

At that time, the only possible stance for ardent intellectuals to take was to be part of the ‘resistance’, and many college students subscribed to radical and romantically provocative means to express their political opinions and criticize the military government. 

 

There was quite an influential group of artists whose fundamental agenda was to be directly involved in this ‘resistance’: by addressing the political reality through art. The Minjung Art Group was basically artists-cum-activists. They were primarily concerned about the change of society; and their art was revolutionary in subject matter, but not in technique or style. As a matter of fact, to them, talking about how art must remain in the individual artist’s realm of perception towards the world was outrageously sinful; because to them, art was subject to its particular social and historical environment. Regardless of the regression of their artistic style, the Minjung Art Group gained considerable momentum by riding on the wave of social discontent.

 

At the other side of the art scene, there was a camp of abstraction art which, in my opinion, turned to reductivism. These artists remained nonchalant and apathetic to the political environment that was engulfing them.

 

I was partly sympathetic to the cause of the Minjung Art Group, thus the subject matter in my work was also of the ordinary people – whose bodies were scarred or marred, or some heavy foreign material was added to. My concern at that time was how I could portray the existential limit which I thought was the vulnerable undercurrent of all the social conflicts and antinomy. In spite of the seemingly common denominator in terms of the subject matter, I avoided the same directness of Minjung Art, because I did not believe in the literal message in artworks. To me, their art was in no way a ‘transformation’ – I was even frustrated with my own works since they also too easily elicited a response. If the relation between an artwork and the viewer is simply for the purpose of message relaying, then on the very moment that the message is denoted, the artwork is completely exhausted. In this way, I thought that I had been caught up in-between what were dominant aesthetic trends, and in fact, found myself in the marginalized realm of the art scene. 

 

2)

BILJANA CIRIC: In the nineties, you spent some time studying in Germany. How did the new environment influence your work?

 

LEE YONG-DEOK: You see, just before I went to Berlin, I was feeling tired and vacant from creating works; it was as if I were coming up with serial bookish slogans. I felt failure when the meaning of my works was finally understood by spectators, because it made me feel that the work was just a method to deliver meaning and sensibility. I desired to start on a clean slate at some new place.

 

Berlin in the early 1990 still felt as if it had not fully woken up from the influence of social realism, until the generation of Leipzig painters had spotlight in the mid-1990s. In the former West Germany, there was also the presence of the legacies of German Expressionism. In the field of sculptures, Ulrich Rückriem’s was still hanging on and I remember that I was seeing Baselitz in the real Germany’s historical context. I was in a position of being able to observe their art scene as an expatriate artist and at the same time it made me be able to focus on myself and my art.    

 

So I began my new life at the studio at Univeritaat der Kunste Berlin (HdK). One unforgettable moment that I would like to share is my encounter with a peculiar piece of wood in the hallway of the university. I found a piece of rope to suspend it down from the ceiling. When it was balanced, the wood slowly span due to the air currents that was ever so slightly flowing. Time was no longer flowing; instead I felt it piling up in the space and the intensity of it caught my attention straight away. I felt that I could see time. It was like being absorbed into a mystic space of tranquility. The aesthetic ecstasy that I felt was indescribable.

 

Although this encounter was random, transient and devoid of rational thinking, it was also an experience that made the invisible visible in the real world. Looking back, that chance encounter made me depart from the reason-oriented, contrived aesthetic stance, and enabled me to react to what was there more open-minded.

 

3)

BILJANA CIRIC: One of your important works at that time was done from a photo from the 1920s, and in the statement of that work, you talk about the sense of truth and human existence...? How important a role does photography play in your sculpture works?

 

LEE YONG-DEOK: My interest in photography lies in the fact that I transfer its memories and representations to another medium – my sculptures – and in doing so I come to some truths about the reality that may or may not be suspended in time and space. A photographed object – especially documentary photographs –is in itself, a realistic representation of that particular moment in time and space. Stored and saved upon the image of this specific instant is a reality that is rich, full of memory and emotions – photography is simply a record of the past after all, in the most general sense. Inescapably, time passes, and the realness of the reality that resides in the photograph becomes no more than a representation; because realness is transient. Time and space has died – even if our emotional dialogue with the photograph clings on. 

 

So in relation to that, my terra cotta sculpture on the German boys marks the beginning of my envisioning and preparing the concepts of my art.When I encountered their fateful photograph at the Berlin flea market, I had a definitive dialogue with the past. I saw their identities as they were frozen in the time-space of 1920, and understood more of their stories as I began to realize the tragedies that were to unfold with the Second World War. One might say that the photograph had brought the walls of the past down and I was looking at the past through the window of my present. Crossing the window to the other side meant time and space bent unnaturally because the layers of the present of the schoolboys and the present of my own life had been fused. On the photographic surface, the currents of time in the past were swept out, leaving us with “non-space” and “non-time”. By sculpting these 33 German boys, what I did was to make them exist in form in the space and time of the present.

 

4)

BILJANA CIRIC: Works done in recent years are recognized as negative sculptures. How did you develop the concept, and what was the first piece that you produced as a negative sculpture and when?

 

LEE YONG-DEOK: My sculptures in recent years are actually recognized as ‘inverted’ sculptures. I had made my first negative sculpture in the middle of the 1980s. My bronze sculptures then had portions of the body that were negative, while the rest were positive; such a mixture of the exterior poking in and out, and still maintaining a deceptive perception of a whole positive appearance was all part of my raw, young and positive artistic ideals. Back then, I felt that in order to mix in both elements of contradiction I had to include all of them in the works physically. 

 

Whenever I look back at this time, I feel that I was looking for some immaterial proof that I was stuck right at the ledge of enlightenment and yet could not a find a way in. My work, which contained both the negative and the positive in one body, was an automatic projection of my own presumptions of the world as I saw – that the world is wrapped with bipolar contradictions. As I said earlier, my revelatory experience in Germany played an ultimate role in transforming the concept of the negative, not into something that is the antithesis of the positive, but into something that is autonomously substantial, which caused a change in the nature of my sculptures to becomeinverted sculptures. The essence of my inverted sculpture is that one could create a body by removing the space around it; but, I decided to remove the body from the space and in doing so, I have embraced negative mass in place of positive mass.

 

5)

BILJANA CIRIC: Can you explain how the inverted sculpture deals with the sense of illusion?

 

LEE YONG-DEOK: The illusory element in my sculptures is the main culprit that makes viewers move towards the sculptures or away from them; the observers are made to be physically involved. The movement and the illusory experience is a basic part of exploring my inverted sculptures. In other words, they are aware of the process of their perception in relation to the sense of sight and the distance. 

 

6)

BILJANA CIRIC: Through the new possibilities that your inverted sculptures have explored, how would you compare traditional sculptures to your own?

LEE YONG-DEOK: My sculptures are expression of the idea of existence through the idea of non-existence. The method of the traditional sculpture is in alignment with the way how the object exists in this world; it exists in one way or the other and it is represented by the same way. There is no discrepancy. In my inverted sculptures, the empty cavity which signals non-existence – what is opposite to the usual mode of the usual existence – becomes paradoxically filling. My method is on the reverse register of actual existence.  

 

7)

BILJANA CIRIC: The grand scale series that you produced in the last few years shows the daily actions and the daily motions. Can you tell me about the creative process of the work in transforming your materials, that is, photographs, into the inverted sculpture?

 

LEE YONG-DEOK: In choosing the correct creative process to move from one medium to another, “Transference” is a concept that is very central to my works. In this process, there are two distinct “transfers” between mediums. When we are faced with certain decisions and actions in our daily lives, whether material or immaterial, we might store this decision using a camera. By capturing this actuality into a photographic image, we have transferred it. However, it is unavoidable that in having done so, we lose elements of what we believe to have captured in its totality. In fact, we end up erasing its real time and real space; forever lost in the image is its rich emotional context. All that remains is a realistic verisimilitude of what was once truly real. 

 

The second “transference” occurs as I take the contents of the photo and transform them into my inverted sculptures. Loss is again inevitable and inescapable – pieces of myself fall into the clay models due to habits and obligatory decisions. However, I do my utmost best to minimize the desire to become subjective. In the process of their finalization, I endow my sculptures with only certain aspects of its original photographic identity. In this way, all my inverted sculptures have fragmentary identities, that is to say that they own identities that are devoid of personal details such as who that person is, what his name is or what kind of job the person has. What is important here is, the images lose their comprehensive personal information about themselves but in their stead, they are given space around them whichtells the viewer about a trace and time of their existence. 

 

8)

BILJANA CIRIC: Your inverted sculptures are enclosed in ‘boxes’, and many viewers comment that this aspect makes them more distanced. Tell us how this is connected to your notions about space-time – whether in relation to the viewer or to the sculptures themselves.

 

LEE YONG-DEOK: People might say that my sculptures are enclosed in boxes. It is true: because it seems that they are trapped within a box of their own space-time relation. With regard to the real time-space relation, I think I already explained this in my earlier answers. In my inverted sculptures, human images are stored after being transferred from their real time and space. They can be considered as being visually trapped in a box of their own existential condition, but it can also be said that they dwell in the realm of below-the-flat-surface: sub-surface. They are stored in the realm of non-existence. The box serves as a device for materializing their isolated reality from time and space.

 

9)

BILJANA CIRIC: How is the shadow related to your inverted or negative sculptures? Could your silhouette works be understood as temporal sculptures where actual process is more important than the product?

 

LEE YONG-DEOK: I will talk about the concept of my silhouette works first.

 

The shadow – I actually prefer silhouette – exists on the flat plane, which is something that both conceptually and materially represents the ‘0’ (zero) that is in between ‘positive’ and ‘negative’, in a numerical sense. ‘Zero’ does not mean nothingness; it is a contact point where the positive and negative collide, and also the border between existence and non-existence. 

 

Now, several of my silhouette works involve the viewer’s participation. For example, when the viewer is made to leave his shadow – the flake of his past – behind upon my art work, he then becomes the active creator of the silhouette concept itself. After looking at his own shadow that is now separated from himself, the viewer perceives that in fact it is not that the shadow has been left on the wall, but that light is illuminating around a darkness that is in the shape of his body. Likewise, as I have stated before, my inverted sculptures encompass the similar notion that I am not creating a body in space, but carving the body out – a silhouette is created by illuminatingthe space surrounding it.