Features artasiapacific.com^85began to break away from seeking inspiration in traditional art-
historical textbooks. Instead, his early art practice was based on
exploring his own observations about material goods and their
social context, as well as the power of public space and its impact on
individual experience.
Lee created his debut series “Riding Art” (2005) the year after
he graduated from Dongguk University. The idea of parodying a
playground had occurred to him one day when thinking about those
around him and the oppressive environment of social conformity.
In his head, he had likened the inevitable process of entering a
regimented education and work system to a playground ride in
which one is forced to bounce up and down, while spinning round
and round. Translating that metaphor into a series of objects, Lee
tested a DIY style that he later honed and utilized in other series
such as “Made In.” He modified secondhand office and school
furniture with plywood, metal and other materials to create
hybridized playground equipment, including a seesaw, climber,
mini-tricycles and a merry-go-round. The rides are intended for
use by viewers, although not entirely for play. As the audience sits
and twirls on the objects, it becomes clear that Lee’s intention is to
satirize a pervasively systematized society, where individuals must
passively follow the rules of the ride in order to be included.
In the formative years following “Riding Art,” Lee deepened his
explorations of commodities in contemporary society. In 2008,
he presented the video piece Dei Gratia (2008) at a group show
titled “I Am An Artist” at the National Museum of Modern and
Contemporary Art in Gwacheon. The color video—just over eight
minutes long—features what appears to be a continuous take of a
rotating pedestal, upon which a dead bird features alongside empty
packages of popular perfume brands, cigarette cartons, painkillers,
as well as a gold-plated crown, ring and a large plastic version of a
British one-pound coin. Throughout the video, Lee intermittently
replaces the packages with other well-known international-branded
products—a Heineken beer bottle, a McDonald’s french-fry
container, a box of Tylenol—while the bird continues to rot.
The work explores the increasing gap between mortality and
existence as well as the disparity between the natural world and
mass-produced objects. As time lapses in the video, crawling larvae
begin to feast on the bird’s tiny corpse while the empty packages
remain perfectly intact. The rotating disk seems to symbolize the
endless cycle of human consumption, which continues despite life
and death. The title of the video is also an ironic reference to the
Latin phrase “By the grace of God,” that signals the divine sovereignty
claimed by European monarchies (and is similar to the phrase found
on the reverse side of British and Canadian coins). In Lee’s video
it also refers to the idolatry that comes from a society worshipping
heavily marketed objects such as exotic perfumes and cigarettes.
This uncanny, symbolic use of rotating objects—evoking Buddhist-
inflected notions of repetition and the cycle of life—recalls Lee’s
metaphor of humans as items on a merry-go-round, and his own
sense of anxiety and distress when confronted by social conformity.
If Dei Gratia was a poignant reflection of the artist’s discomfort
with the vicious cycle of consumerism, his subsequent works were
deliberate attempts to change his own habits and mindset as an
individual constantly exposed to such materialism. Around the same
time as the creation of Dei Gratia, Lee began a series of works, “Life Is
Widely Spreading Blood-Red Ripples” (2008–09), that featured food
items for the first time, investigating his hypothesis that consumerism
was an inevitable outcome of human desires for convenience. The
first work in this series, Kiss Lonely Goodbye, Chicken Baseball (2008),
is an installation of seemingly ordinary-looking baseballs, some
of which are placed inside a yellow supermarket basket and others
scattered across a patch of artificial grass. Upon closer inspection,
it becomes clear that the baseballs were in fact sculpted from an
unusual and unlikely material: ground chicken.
When first shown in Korea, Lee’s strange objects turned heads.
With this work, the artist aimed to disrupt the banality that pervades
quotidian processes and rituals. The added optical illusion was aHis early art practice was
based on exploring his
own observations about
material goods as well
as the power of public
space and its impact on
individual experience.