brilliant 30: Dongi Lee

The Pop art movement in America has been interpreted as an escape from the hold of abstract expressionism, and asserting of popular or "low" culture against the ingrained elitism of fine art. Dongi Lee, an artist representative of the bourgeoning of new civil consciousness in Korea during the 1990s, would concur that his work ‘Atomaus’ was conceived in a similar context. Lee’s first public exhibit, <Young Korean Artist ’92> at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art played a critical role in setting the pace for Korean contemporary art in the post-'90s era. However, it would be wrong to label Lee’s work as "pop art" alone. Rather, it is a meticulous observation and larger critique of the excessive amount of imagery generated by new media in contemporary society.

The subjects present in Lee's bodies of works make their appeal with a vague familiarity. The ambivalent identities of Lee’s characters minimize the subjectivity of the artist, leaving room for an open interpretation for the viewer. Thus, Lee’s works are not defined and concluded by the artist; rather, their continuing life - as Bernhard Serexhe (Chief Curator at the Center for Art and Media (ZKM) in Karlsruhe) put it, the “viewer’s active response and emotional engagement.” The artist opens up the process of representation, inviting the public to try to seek meaning in his work without applying social or culture preconceptions to it. In order to extend this invitation to a wider range of viewers, Lee’s oeuvre to date includes figurative and non-figurative paintings. He does not dwell on the extent of Korean pop art; instead, Lee sees his position in terms of a catalyst for interactions among the works, the audience and their surroundings.

I am not familiar with Semiotics, but this passage from the theorist Ferdinand de Saussure made a big impact on my work: ‘Signifiers and groups have been arbitrarily combined.’ My interpretation of this passage was that signifiers and groups do not normally belong together. A while back, I read an article from the magazine <Space> regarding Jacques Derrida’s dissertation on “Differance” and wanted to express visually what I felt about Saussure.

From a visual standpoint, images and content in the mass media may not necessarily have a feasible relationship with one another. I have struggled with the dilemma of two similar works of art created by different artists where one is deemed more valuable than the other. The notion that “the subject communicates an objective and universal truth to the audience” is no longer possible.