Features artasiapacific.com^87(Opposite page, top and middle)
KISS LONELY GOODBYE, CHICKEN
BASEBALL, 2008, from the series “Life
is Widely Spreading Blood-Red Ripples”
(2008-09), objects remanufactured with
grated chicken, dimensions variable.
(Opposite page, right)
THE HOUSEHOLD ITEMS, 2009, from the
series “Life is Widely Spreading Blood-red
Ripples” (2008-09), objects remanufactured
with grated beef, dimensions variable.
(Opposite page, bottom)
Work in progress for the series “Life is
Widely Spreading Blood-Red Ripples.”
(This page)
“Forlorn Standard” series, 2010, object
cutting and polishing, dimensions variable.
twist on mainstream associations between food and sports,
serving as an eerie critique on the absurdity of Korea’s mass
consumption habits and how they are deeply linked to American
culture—Korean fried chicken, canned meat like Spam and baseball
all being legacies of the US military’s occupation of the Korean
peninsula in the 1950s. As Lee explained to me, “Baseball is most
popular in developing countries that built strong economic and
diplomatic ties with the United States. South Korea’s obsession
with baseball is no exception—its fan base grew concurrently
with exponential capitalist development during the postwar
period, under a heavy American influence.” In this light, the
chicken “baseballs” seem to physically embody Lee’s musings on
the everyday consumption of convenience goods and sports as
something inextricably bound to neoliberalist attitudes.
While Lee has criticized the prevalence of global capitalism in
Korean society, he is also keenly skeptical of more local politics.
Another work in the “Life Is Widely Spreading Blood-Red Ripples”
series, titled The Household Items (2009) utilized ground beef to create
lifelike replicas of utilitarian items commonplace in South Korea,
such as a stick of lumber, a broom, a plunger and a spade. Lee said he
specifically chose objects with a highly discernible use. For example,
the stick is normally used in Korean high schools and the military
for corporal punishment, while the luminescent green broom is used
to clean streets and other public spaces. When Lee re-creates these
objects in beef, thereby rendering them useless, the object’s symbolic
value and status in society—whether representing authority, like the
stick, or subservience, like the broom—are brought into question. For
his solo exhibition at Seoul’s Total Museum of Contemporary Art in
2009, Lee hung these sculptures on a storage rack, while others leaned
against the wall in simulacrum of a domestic situation. Upon closer
inspection, the strangely synthetic texture of the animal meat—coated
with thick acrylic paint and varnish—revealed the deceptive nature of
Lee’s objects. This visual spin underlined the perceived and prescribed
values we place on objects.
Lee’s view of Korean society is unapologetically critical and
candid. After making the “Life Is Widely Spreading Blood-Red
Ripples” series, he expounded on his rejection of conformist
pressures by physically—sometimes violently—altering objects
in the series “Forlorn Standard” (2010). One of the central aims
of this body of work was to explore how objects could reflect the
psychological strain of complying with ideological conventions.
He took various household items and materials and put them
through drastic modifications. Slabs of brick and stone, tiles,
wheels of trolleys, hammers and other mundane objects, were
cut, ground and polished to create a reflective surface. While it is
harder to change the uneven clay-based exterior of a brick into
a mirror, Lee explained to me that other objects, such as a solid-
iron gym weight, transform relatively easily into a mirror due to
their metallic composition. This brutal transformation forced very
different objects to become more similar in both appearance and
utilitarian value. The uniformity created a sense of order, restraint
and control. At the same time, subtle variations in color, material
and form convey the extent to which standardization also creates
differentiation among individuals, showing the impossibility of
adopting a singular standard.
Continuing his focus on dogmatic social obedience and
processes of coercive transformation in How to Become Us (2011),
Lee collected used and discarded objects from the streets—
including mannequins, plastic water bottles, stools, trays, shovels
and a refrigerator—and exhibited them at Seoul alternative space
Art Space Pool in 2011. He split, cut and combined these materials
into 60 assemblages, which he placed on individual industrial
scales showing that each had achieved the exact mean weight—5.06
kilograms—of the collective mass. Appearing almost like a window
display, the work evoked the regulated structures of a supermarket.
Its title, How to Become Us, also carried the ironic implication that
overarching collective systems determine our individual identities.
Lee pushes back against a reality that he sees as dictated by
capitalist ideology. He mentioned in our conversation that he often
feels blindsided by the intentionally complex rules of capitalism,
which he thinks are irrational and unpredictable, and a catalyst for
volatile social conditions. In one of Lee’s most iconic sculptures,
The Possibility of Impossible Things (2012), he explores our ability
to determine and predict future value of objects in an era of
capitalism and mass production. The sculpture features a beam
scale with a stone brick hung on one side, and a large rubbish bag
with undisclosed contents on the other. The work refers to the
financial collapse Lee witnessed in 1997, when a severe depletion
of the government’s foreign-exchange reserves had necessitated a
bailout by the International Monetary Fund. Although Lee doesn’t