John RAJCHMAN
KIM Wonbang
Ban Ejung
Lee Jinmyung

WORKS OF LEE YONG BAEK :
A PHILOSOPHICAL MIRROR OF THE DIGITAL SIMULATION AGE

KIM Wonbang | Art critic

One of the most imperative reasons for there being regular international exhibitions, including Venice Biennale, is to satisfy the ‘desires for meaning’. It is to create tangible form and meaning from chaos by mapping the extensive trends of contemporary art in one space-time, thereby coming into contact with the ‘integral view and knowing’ as well as ‘historicized meaning’ immanent in such trends of contemporary art. In that sense, they are like a monstrous global machine of knowledge through which elements of unpredictability and potentiality immanent in the process of art production becomes subjugated under our visual desire, or even worse, are incorporated into symbolic order of all possible kinds of art history and theory. Such supersized international exhibitions function as a device which solidifies the superiority of interpretative language and administrative system of art, and the priority of the closed notion of Art World over becoming and mutation. However, such system of knowledge is like a retroactive (après-coup) illusion that results from regarding the exhibition as a whole and restructuring it in macroscopic scale as a linguistic syntax. In microscopic perspective, individual works in the biennale are like contingent particles that are continuously formed within a certain overall flow and process. An art work is a fleeting moment when the invisible imaginary dimension of art is figured accidentally. In that sense, an art work has real elements of authentic originality when it has deviated from the definition of creativity, rather than when it is recognized as being creative. Also in that sense, the truly creative artists are probably well aware of how fruitless it is to strive to fit their work in the main stream of so-called ‘international art world’ and to secure their work in the status of art.

Representing the Korean pavilion at this 54th Venice Biennale, Lee Yongbaek is an artist whose works have a ‘moment of singularity’. In order for artists from countries like Korea, which still remains peripheral to the main stream of international art scene, to appear on international art stage, they often ‘jump on the bandwagon’ with the West- such as “Relational Art” prevalent since the 1990s or documentary art based on mounds of postcolonial reports- or use commonplace strategies to attract curiosity from the West, appropriating some exotic motives from Buddhist art, Oriental paintings and Asian folk culture. For the last 20 years, Lee has always maintained his distance from such commonplaceness, steadily striving for internal development and maturation of his work. This consciousness is clearly apparent in the composition of works exhibited in the Korean Pavilion. Lee refused to build new works befitting the biennale atmosphere or to draw attention by constructing gigantic installation; rather, he chose to completely expose his work as work in progress.

An artist who has been experimenting with technology art since early 1990s, from single channel video to interactive art, sound installation, and research on synesthesia and robotics, Lee has been known as an internationally-celebrated artist especially through the last 10 years of his active exhibition history throughout Europe and China. Since early 1990s, Lee’s visually and materially diverse works have been dealing with the most important cultural issues of this digital age, including the decentered subjectivity in the age of virtual reality, epistemological changes accompanied by digital simulacra, the end of analogue language and the arrival of cultural paganism.

Although diverse in medium, works exhibited in the Korean Pavilion this year consist of a few series of works that are closely interconnected with each other in terms of subject matter. There are four series of work, consisting of Angel-Soldier, a video work, Pieta, a sculpture, Mirror, an installation of mirror and video, and Plastic Fish, a painting of fishing baits.

An evolving work since 2005, Angel-Soldier series consists of video, photography and sculptural installation, depicting a scene filled with artificial flowers. Upon closer look, however, the viewer discovers a gunned soldier walking slowly, camouflaged in artificial flowers. By fusing a soldier and a background of imitation or simulacrum of flowers, this work juxtaposes the digitalized society’s cyberspace, a construction of new nature, with a bleak war in the virtual world which has been separated from the real. It is also an allegory of Arthur Kroker’s “liquid ego” or the new digital ontology, which absorbs into the cyberspace, transforms into an avatar symbol, and disseminates and vanishes in the network. It portrays the cyberspace as a space of anxiety where the modern Cartesian ego collapses, or paradoxically, as a space of pleasure and death drive which strives to annihilate the ego that’s become obsolete in such age.

Problems of the death drive in the worlds where simulacrum replaces the real, are clearly raised in other works by Lee. In the Plastic Fish series, for example, the image of the bait, or the lure, is portrayed close-up and in hyperrealist style, amplifying as much as possible its essence as a simulacrum. Through excessive visual stimulation of the flashing plastic covering of the baits and their hyperreal depiction, the viewer is lured into a state of immersion by the so-called “fatal seduction” of the simulacrum. This phenomenon illustrates the typical hyperreality where the dividing line between external object and internal subject collapses; in other words, a metonymic correspondence occurs between the depicted bait and the viewer’s gaze. Such is something like the “empty glimmering sardine can floating in the sea” mentioned by Jacques Lacan in his theory of gaze. The moment one becomes immersed in the flashes of light reflected off the can, the can in and of itself becomes an object of no significance. ‘Excessive seeing’ inverses the direction of the gaze, from the object of the gaze to the subject of the gaze, leading to the world of blindness and death drive.

Lee’s Pieta series takes the relationship between Jesus and Mary from the classical work Pieta, and parodies it by using the two elements of sculptural casting: the mold and the form. In Lee’s Pieta, Jesus and Mary are replaced by a sort of cyborgian robot. This work seems to echo Donna Haraway’s theory that in the digital age, humans and gods in modern humanistic sense will have disappeared, being replaced by all kinds of blasphemous hybrid cyborgs, robots, and biotechnological monsters that have mutated off evolution and biology. The relationship between the producer and the produced, or the creator and the created, as parodied by the positive and negative aspects of sculpture, insinuates some process of self generation of a bachelor or asexual reproduction in which elements of biological gender are eliminated. In this sense, Pieta goes beyond the three partite relationship of the father-mother-child that’s always been the traditional ground for psychoanalysis, to metaphorically signifying the characteristics of Anti-Oedipal reproductive method and the degendered subject that will occupy the forthcoming age of digital technology, biotechnology and cyborgs.

Such bachelor-type self-replication process signifies the end of the ‘absolute difference’ in digital age. Existing without its original, digital simulacrum is nothing more than an appearance that fuses with each other and mutates. In general, as a matter of fact, simulacra inevitably tend to fuse with each other, or are composed of homogenous dimensions that are already fused. To borrow Jean Baudrillard’s view, the simulacra inevitably implodes inside their functional circuit and no sign is opposed to the other. All differences function in reflexive manner inwards toward oneself, rather than outwards to the other. In Pieta, for example, the negative mold and the positive form seem to momentarily cast juxtaposition and difference in form; however, the process of reproduction itself is possible through a mutually integrated and chiasmatic relationship. Consequently, the relationship between positive and negative is not an oedipal relationship that is based on hierarchy and opposition; rather, it is in the dimension of non-difference where all absolute differences are neutralized, in the assembly of potentiality where there never was the original. In this sense, the world of simulacra seems to be filled with turbulent differences and conflicts on the outside, but the semantic base is utter meaninglessness, or a world of death.

Simulacrum is nothing more than the leftover of a stillbirth of a being that was impossible even before its conception. It’s not language, truth, or even image. It’s just an appearance of which its original cannot be found, a nothingness of which its original is non-existent. Consequently, it is seized by the drive for excessive and repetitive production to build the truth as fabrication, and to hide the pregnancy of a deficient existence that ended in stillbirth. Therefore, simulacrum always reveals itself excessively in qualitative and quantitative terms rather than being calm self-restraint, like the plastic bait that fills the screen in Plastic Fish or the bachelor-type reproduction in Pieta.

The Mirror series explores the collapse of boundary between the so-called real space and virtual space. Monitors are stationed behind large mirrors, projecting images of mirror breaking or large water drops forming and dripping. Here, the viewer comes to experience the illusion of the mirror breaking or actual water drops forming on the mirror. This illusion arouses a very different sensation from seeing the image on a monitor or through the projector, because the material sensation of the mirror as an actual object and the imaginary image are completely fused into one. Thus, the work effectively places the viewer in the ambiguous border between real space and imaginary space, or consciousness and dream. Strictly speaking, the mirrors do not break, but lead to a space of fantasy in which breaking occurs through the imagination. Mirror breaking repetitively without reason stirs up anxiety like neurotic compulsive repetition. Lee’s works are spaces that immerse the viewer into an imaginary space and simulacra, while also being a philosophical mirror that reflects its deadly side.

Besides his works exhibited in the Korean Pavilion, most of Lee Yongbaek’s past works take a broad approach to the cultural characteristics of our digital age. For example, Artificiality Emotion (1999-2000) is a synesthesiac project which links the viewer’s breathing and movement to the breathing and eye movement of a dead cow, by combining the dead cow with camera and mechanical apparatus. Tactile Documentary (1999) explores the naked body of a homosexual man through an LCD screen that travels back and forth on a rail, as if to scan his body, signifying the gaze that is frowned upon in the symbolic order of the society. Religious icons such as Buddha and Jesus are compounded together in Abnormal (2002), touching on blasphemous paganism and ideas of transgression. Twins in Monitor (2001) delves into the decentralization of subject in virtual space.

For the last 20 years, Lee has been using various technologies not only as the medium but also as the subject matter of his work, and raising questions about technology. Like Nam June Paik, Lee treats technology as the medium and formal element of art and explores its subversive aspect, while maintaining a critical distance towards a myriad of technology art works that end in futile ostentations of mere technological performance. While exercising vigilance against fetishism and optimism of technology, Lee’s desire is to attest to the new post human evolution that technology brings to human life.