88 | MAY/JUN 2017 | ISSUE 103explicitly make mention of this event, the work suggests a cynical
attitude to the notion of equating monetary and material values. This
apprehension—and confusion about what equals what—is represented
in a delicate balance between certainty and uncertainty. When Lee
showed The Possibility of Impossible Things at the Daegu Art Museum
in 2012, the vertical pole of the scale was masked with a green cloth,
on top of which he perched a taxidermy pheasant. While the scarf
reflects the obfuscation of stock market exchange by masking the axis
of balance, the bird, according to Lee, is a metaphor for our inability to
operate outside of consumerist society. Lee said of the pheasant: “Its
wild ancestors were apparently much stronger... and intellectually
superior, but [the birds] degenerated due to inactivity.”
Up until 2013, the scope of Lee’s explorations of consumption
had been expressed through his abstract assemblages and
sculptures. While former works critiqued consumerist culture, the
“Made In” series delved deeper into these interests by looking at
the geopolitical implications of capitalism in modern urban life.
Each of the 12 multichannel videos in the series provided insightful
commentary on the artist’s experience of entering an unfamiliar
environment and laboriously creating a single commodity by
himself. For example, in the Cambodia segment, the video’s Korean
and English subtitles provided personal and interpretive notes
on the political history of Cambodia and its rice production, from
the time of its liberation from French colonial rule in the 1950s
to the mid-1970s, when the Khmer Rouge came to power under
the ruthless Pol Pot. We see Lee first traveling to the Tuol Sleng
Genocide Museum and later navigating his way to the rice farm
on the outskirts of Phnom Penh, where he meets and interviews a
farmer who was a former Khmer Rouge soldier. It is this farmer who
gives Lee grains of rice to plant a crop that will become one of the
final products in the work. In this way, Lee connects the still-vital
act of cultivating rice to a traumatic and turbulent period, where
more than two million people were either brutally murdered or
perished due to labor exhaustion or starvation as a result of Pol Pot’s
attempts to build a classless, agrarian society.
Lee 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.