Art & Technology #6: Lee-Nam Lee

Art has long been a virtual event of sorts. Prehistoric artists drew images of ox on the cave walls with an image of a living, breathing organism in mind. The cave dwellers who gazed at those images saw much more than the image itself. They saw the ox, existing in the cave as if by magic. We define those events as art, because they did not cease at mere conveyance of information.

They opened a canvas of unlimited imagination, pondering, and reason. So for art, the stationary nature of the signifier did not pose a problem at all, and even at times viewed as better than the moving images because they were inhibitions to intellect and reason. That was the reason why the marvel and innovation of early cinema failed to segue into a subject of philosophical thought, because that’s what the moving images were: sleight deception and bedazzlement.

Lee-Nam Lee’s presentations reach beyond technological novelty. If it is through media which technology enables the movement of images, Lee's works are a revelation of how those movements can be interpreted differently. His works can also be interpreted differently, in terms of contrasting, even clashing elements: static and kinetic images, digital and analog, East and West, classical and contemporary. By giving movement to the images, Lee gave paradoxical liberty to the fixation of reason.

He brought the West's da Vinci to coexist with the Korean Kim Hong-do, the everyday painter from the Joseon period of Korea. The artist began drawing from Western artists in 2009, presenting his iterations of Gogh's self-portraits, da Vinci's <Mona Lisa>, and a melding of Kyumjae Jeongsun and Paul Cezanne's works. Somewhere along the line when contemporary art has been slipping away into a complex obscurity enigmatic and unapproachable by the public at large, Lee-Nam Lee solicits the public back with witty, imaginative invitations.

The insides of his works are filled with digital processes, but the interfaces are quite intentionally very analogue; clashing elements are a significant part of Lee's technique. Contrast appears to be a sort of formal vernacular entertained by media art, starting from Paik. The contrast appears effective because analogue offsets the levity of digital, while the functional limits of the analog is complemented by the digital. Lee-Nam Lee's <Crossover Georges Pierre Seurat>(2010) for example, appropriated from Georges Seurat's <Bathers at Asnières>(1884), where the fleeting colors sought by Post-Impressionist arts, and formative elements of Pointillism were transformed and brought back through a digital pixelization process. The result transcends the changing of visual elements and calls upon the visual-percept concept sought by Impressionist artists. Furthermore, through his appropriation, Lee creates an unobtrusive juxtaposition of elements in visual perception and their contemporary manifestation in the digital setting. Ultimately, the colored points expand into pixel combinations, gradually transforming into colored form, and in the end a singular color.

And as such, his works reincarnate the original material in a dual relationship of complementary and coexisting content and form. The duality is not unlike the mutual emphasis between the static and kinetic images that implore us toward diverse interpretations.

Considering how Lee's works develop within media, more particularly the framework of screens, his subsequent efforts to foray out of it to once again outgrow it, might be an inevitable course of action for the artist. Take his white porcelain moon jar brought to the screen. The subdued gloss white porcelain surface and the projected directness of media in <Transfigurated Moon Jar - Butterfly)>(2011) gradually displays translucent images as indirect elements. As unexpected images are slowly projected on the white porcelain moon jar, viewers become aware of infinite space and the virginal white within it (his moon jar works are a homage to sculptural arts, which Lee originally studied.)

After all, Lee-Nam Lee utilizes media to look back in time to reinterpret classic paintings and ambitiously combine contemporary elements, reminding us of media’s primary function of mediation, for lack of a better word. And because that very media is also what connects his works, giving continuity across his body work, perusing his works for the common underlying message can also be a fruitive effort. At a recent solo exhibition <Reborn Light> at the Gana Art Center, Lee-Nam Lee presented an image of Christ carrying a CRT TV in place of the cross. As if to declare the double-sidedness of the today's TV (or equivalent media) in comparison to the significance of crucifix throughout history, the icon present in Lee's independent presentation <Why Did Christ Carry the TV?>(2014) is reintroduced in <Light for Each Person>(2014) as an allegorical element.

Along with the ambivalence, he also presents the mediating nature of media with its inherently diminutive, transformative, amplificative and reductive properties. Exhibited alongside each other, his works <Grandmother with a Pearl Earring - Tear>(2014) and <Girl with a Pearl Earring - Tear>(2014) uses a glass-like medium to show how thoroughly our perspective may be distorted. In comparison to Lee's earlier works, his recent presentations have been much more direct in terms of revealing the roles and functions of media. Works composed of identical media may carry a very different significance or context. To reiterate, Lee-Nam Lee is reconstructing classical works through media, where his intentions do not lie therein, but rather in exploring novel means to approach the concept of art. This is because to the seminal video artist, art is not something to be burdened by toilsome semantics, but rather an exciting world of new possibilities and potential happenings. ■ Yoo Wonjoon, Director of AliceOn, with ARTINPOST