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John RAJCHMAN
Lee Jinmyung | Art critic
1. Confinement of an Era’s Atmosphere Commissioner Yun Cheagab chose artist Lee Yongbaek to present his works at the Korean Pavilion during the 54th Venice Biennale. For the last few months, I have been wondering why Yun Cheagab selected Lee Yongbaek as the sole artist to participate in the 54th Venice Biennale. I wanted to know everything that sparked him to choose Lee Yongbaek, as Yun Cheagab is an earnest curator who has lived for the reconstruction of Asian art and Korean culture, and tends to go to extreme measures, driven to the bottom of a cliff by the futility of life. We confronted, Lee Yongbaek, who is known as an artist who covers all fields of contemporary art, from media art, sculpture, photographs, to painting, and who has achieved artistic triumph, freely manipulating formations consisting of sensibility, form, and behavior. This is at least our understanding of him. He is a rare Asian artist who has achieved a global formality with a mechanism of his own development. However, Korea’s art circles regard him too abstractly as a postmodern artist. When postmodernism is defined as an ideological trend or movement that denies values such as totality, universality, historical macro discussion, the firm ground of existentialism, and the undoubted possibility of knowledge, it is a groundless claim to call Lee Yongbaek a postmodern artist. Lee Yongbaek spent his childhood in a city near Seoul, South Korea. During this period, a military dictatorship, or a development dictatorship, ruled over South Korea. This development dictatorship was a form of power politics that prohibited people from thinking and discussing freely under the flag of economic development. There are still various analysis on how such a preposterous high-handed politics ruled over South Korea. And many scholars view the cause of the military dictatorship as the fact pro-American dictatorship of Rhee Syngman was taken down by the popular uprising, the short appearance of the civilian government after the Rhee administration did not yield any significant reformations and failed to present a vision of the future. In addition, the US policy for Northeast Asia in the 1960s was to prevent the domino effect of socialism in Asia and to at least insure Japan as the bastion of Westernized administration. Due to this strategy, the US policy placed South Korea in the role of a shield for Japan. Until Rhee Syngman fled to the US, he had used anti-Japanese feelings and anti-socialism as the foundation of the existence of his regime. However, in order for South Korea to play the role of a shield for Japan, it had to have a superior economic power over communist nations, and the model of South Korea’s economic development could not help but to depend on data regarding the development of Japan, which was ten years ahead of South Korea. As the military dictatorship of Park Chung Hee established diplomatic relations with Japan, it achieved economic development based on this data along with financial loans from Japan. The regime declared that it would reform society and eliminate national corruption and irregularities, and would soon convert the military regime into a civilian one; however, they continued ruling as a violent regime under these same pretexts. In fact, this declaration wasn’t realized for 18 years for various reasons. During this period, human rights, democracy, and the freedom of expression, thought, and assembly were liquidated in South Korea. All kinds of corruption and irregularities were rampant in society, and Korea’s valuable culture was suppressed. At that time, the system of South Korea could be defined as ‘wartime capitalism,’ and this reality seems to have remained unchanged. The past military dictator had no other way but to insist that socialist states were the main enemy, and that the way to win wars was to infinitely expand capital under the flag of anti-socialism. People seemed to respond to these insistences because when they became well-off, they fell into a euphoric feeling as if they had been triumphant in war. This regime used to select appropriate targets and accuse them of all kinds of social problems that could not be solved, and these victims were none other than progressives with a trait of reform. Absurdly, the head of the regime was killed by a gun of one of his men. Following this assassination, another military force tried to illegally take over the regime, which had remained leaderless for a certain period. Using guns and swords, they suppressed citizens who tried to elect a leader through democratic electoral processes. A well-known act of suppression occurred in 1980 in Gwangju, the city of Gwangju Biennale. Gwangju Biennale may be thought of as a kind of large-scale administrative and artistic requiem for healing the trauma of local citizens and honoring the victims. Later, the 1988 Seoul Olympic Games was the final task that finished the basic construction of strengthening South Korea as a shielding nation. South Korea continued developing with burning economic expansion. However, as Hitler-like leaders achieved economic triumph, students and artists suffered from inner antipathy. And the students and artists widely believed that truth would exist on the opposite side of their thoughts. The ideological pivots for anti-autocracy were the books of Karl Marx, adventures of Che Guevara, maxims regarding equality and human rights, indigenous ideas of the Korean Peninsula that awoke a national awareness, the liberation theology of South America, and socialist literature. As the 1990s came to a close, the Tiananmen Square Killings in 1989, West Germany absorbing East Germany in 1990, and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 brought about serious confusion for progressive intellectuals, students, and artists. As China and Russia established diplomatic relations, they came to confirm the fact that the illusion of socialism had been cleared. And the political system, religious consolation, and artistic ideals that they depended on were all besieged by futility. One fortunate aspect was that Koreans finally built a civilian democracy in 1993. However, before the new hopeful vision brewed by the democracy of its civilian government had started to bloom, the IMF crisis befell South Korea. Before Koreans could be re-equipped with new alternative values and ideas, they were caught by the blind competition of globalism. Koreans could do nothing in front of the new international orders offered by the US. Thus, a real Pax Americana had started to become realized in South Korea in 1998. The atmosphere of art could not avoid these social situations. The period of the military dictatorship was ruled by black and white ideas. Art must not be created from any political ignition. Korean artists tried to interpret the forms of monochrome art, minimalism, and abstract expressionism by connecting them with the spirit of Asian Zen Buddhism, the moral training of Confucianism, and the elegant appreciation (of art) of Taoism. In other words, it is a dual structure in which the artists laid the newly translated language of an Asian style onto Western forms. Secondly, Minjung art (an art that focuses on the lives and behavior of people as historical subjects after the Gwangju democratic uprising) widely appeared and analyzed the capitalist pathology of the military dictatorship using the shamanism of the Korean Peninsula, an indigenous religion of exorcism, and the realism of socialism. Meanwhile, the Korean government liberalized its policy on travelling and studying abroad in 1985. However, as the socialist states collapsed in succession beginning in 1989, the transfer of civil rights took place in South Korea in 1993, and the first universal intellectuals who had studied abroad returned to the nation, the two forces lost their strengths. In the 1990s, Western art typically flew into this nation without question. As media, images, photographs, and installation art that were new to Koreans flooded the nation, viewers could not set their point of view, and critics lost their own critical mind and instead depended on the rules of Western postmodernism. The 1990s was a period in which the two pivots that let the world fell to pieces and the world was divided into multilateral aspects. At the same time, plural individualism was an unavoidable trend of the times, and the division between good art and bad art disappeared. In such a confusing situation, Lee Yongbaek appeared in Korea’s art circles at the end of the 1990s. He was one of the artists, including Doho Suh and Lee Bul, who contemplated the voluntary creation of artistic forms and the meaning of Korea’s contemporary art.
2. Lee Yongbaek’s Art In the 1990s, Lee Yongbaek refused all conditions of postmodernism. To him, postmodernism was nothing but a shock treatment to escape the lethargy and weariness of modernism, and the third degenerated body germinating from the body of modernism, as if capitalism and socialism were ideological twins that were inevitably born from Western history. He absorbed the historical and social context of Korea and Asia as his nourishment. When one compares his art with modernism and postmodernism, the characteristics become clear. Since modernism is a perfectly rationalized art created based on existing rules and orders that request an artist to seek the ultimate nature of a genre that cannot be restored, it always reveals reproductions. Thus, modernism is a rational method of thinking that is both colorless and odorless. On the contrary, the art of Lee Yongbaek is essentially a voluntary creation and formation. His creation is not ‘a creation from nothing’ but a creation from a given historical and social reality. For this reason, the fact latent at the base of his art is that he is not an observer passively looking at the world, but a discoverer actively seeking values in the world, and an actor who tries to realize his discovery into the concrete form of art. Thus, the reality of Asia, the history of Korea, the relationship between the region and the world, and the trend of a 21st century world can be found in Lee’s works. The method used to form these characteristics is based on symbols that leave an empty space for interpretation rather than concrete messages. While the sensibility of material and the diversity of meaning in his pieces play a game of pulling and pushing, the two forces maintain a taut balance, forming an extreme tension. As the peculiar meaning of a specific region and the universal sensibility of matters with a global sense encounter each other, he creates a new energy, one that can be at least said has never existed before in South Korea. Lee Yongbaek displayed his work titled New Folder- Drag in Beijing in 2007. The shape of a yellow folder, which can be readily seen on a computer, is a symbol that candidly compares the operational method of the past with the operational method of our current times where computers are common. The sculpture depicts an enlarged ‘new folder’. Lee Yongbaek put this folder on several logs, and let the children in a slum in the outskirts of Beijing ‘drag’ it, which he then filmed. His piece reminds viewers that when things that are easily dealt with in the cyber world of computers are realized in the real world, how difficult it becomes. On the other hand, his piece shows the brutality of institutional measures that prevent the poor living in the outskirts of a big city from entering the center of the city, as well as the deception of fetishism, which is extremely prosperous in Asia. However, the esthetics achieved in this piece is found in an unexpected place. Lee Yongbaek obviously points out the refracted contradiction of the thoughts of contemporaries living in a digital technology era, but he holds even this contradiction with a warm view. The children in the slum carried out hard labor but presented a delightful smile and an exciting feeling the entire time. He often says, “There is no exit in pessimism.” In 2005, Lee Yongbaek had already achieved the foundation of another piece transcending New Folder-Drag. Through a six-year self-reflection and supplementation, he completed at last, the final edition of Angel-Soldier in 2011. This work presents the essence of camouflage humans adopt. It shows the fact that the means of surviving in the animal world is also applied to the human world, at least to Korea’s situation. South Korea can be defined in two words: wartime capitalism. The immoral and unjustifiable ruling ideology has deceived people. Rulers have claimed that there is no way to defeat brutal socialist enemies except through economic pressure. Thus, they have closed their eyes to the division of wealth, the abolition of social discrimination, human rights, and freedom of thought and assembly, promising to solve these problems in the future. Although most people, except for the families and high-ranking officials of conglomerates and central forces in society, have been driven toward an invisible isolation, few people are aware of it. The mainstream media, the hegemony of sports, the feast of corruption, inhumane TV dramas, the morbid myths of fetishism, large Korean-style churches that gained power by depending on anti-communism, and the fabulous faces and bodies of TV entertainers are not only Korea’s angels but also its soldiers. People wearing a flower-patterned military uniform, who are angels and soldiers at the same time, slowly sneak through a fake flower jungle. The strategy to hide an uneasy truth with a splendid appearance of oblivion really is similar with the animal world. When this piece appeared, the relationship between South Korea and North Korea was mild, and thus the true quality of this piece was not well understood. As of 2011, both nations have nervously repeated offensive and defensive battles revealing the nature of both. To the point that a hostile coexistence and the hiding of nature are the frames of their relationship, both nations exit with the camouflage of allomorphism, an angel and a soldier. Apart from the complex social dynamic symbolized by this work, the sound effects of the work, the sounds of grass insects and wind, are quite pleasant. Another one of Lee Yongbaek’s monumental work is Pieta. The original form of all religions and cultures has the mechanism of a victime èmissaire, a scapegoat. The mechanism of a victime èmissaire is a kind of charm against evil influence that tries to prevent the possibility of many sacrifices by choosing a sacrificing target. A series of painting, Plastic Fish, shall be observed. In this series, plastic fish simply fill up the canvas. The pieces have an equal system without a main theme or discrimination. This equality is in fact a confusion itself. It is a fatal gesture of fake items that tries to snatch the value of genuine ones. The word ‘honor’ in the West indicates a life that establishes morality, pursues universal values, and is dedicated to a community. However, the word is misunderstood in South Korea, which is blindly loyal to the West, as a word indicating the rich regardless of their tools and methods. The word ‘sorry’ in the West has a strong responsibility of self-order. However, the word in South Korea implies behavior inconsistent with the word itself, and is a double-faced attitude without responsibility. A society in which moneyed success achieved in a makeshift manner is thought of as honor has no future. On the other hand, in addition to a misfortunate premonition, viewers can find in the series an indication of hope. The series shows that the dissolution of centralism, that is, a society of multilateral values, is being introduced to South Korea and Asia. Totalitarianism is a horror play in a secret room, and its society is controlled by one-sided commands in a closed space. Now, the final act of the horror play has closed its curtain. Recently, the democracy of multilateral values and the mood that equally admits an individual life and the cause of a total society were formed in South Korea. This new movement is quite splendid. This work of Lee Yongbaek also successfully manifests the meaning of the present era rooted in the region of South Korea. As can be seen through his works, the strongest asset of Lee Yongbaek is that he does not remain in personal sentimentalism or habit. All of his pieces reveal meaning that he is existentially confident about the world. Finally, the status of Lee Yongbaek’s art in South Korea’s art world will be examined. In the 1990s, when the civilian government took over power, after black and white ideas such as monochrome art and minimalism, and the modernism of abstract expressionism and Minjung art, had lost their strengths, South Korea’s art had no forms from its own nourishment, but instead uncritically accepted only the outer surface of Western art, and was flooded with these new Western movements. Criticism had to be deferred for a while. However, Lee Yongbaek clearly recognized the wall of his possibility and limitations and made efforts to knock it down. As the efforts are a self-request or self-order, he has carried out such endeavors constantly for the last 20 years. Looking at his artistic journey in 2011, it can be confirmed the type of art that constitutes the quality during the confusing period of South Korea’s art movements: the first criterion for recognizing quality art is that when an artistic form is consistent with the life of the artist who realized the form, and when the artist’s work is the result of a journey made through rough times and trial and effort, the art achieves genuine value. The second criterion is an avant-garde spirit. Avant-garde is defined as the art of an artist confronting the history of existing arts, clearly examining the inner necessity between existing arts and past times, keenly understanding the secret relationship between their lives and their era, and finally realizing this keen understanding as a form. The third criterion is the artist’s spirit creatively making the effort to germinate the seeds of all problems within the era and society of the artist based on his/her sensibility that his/her contemporaries can respond to. The last, and most important, criterion is that a macroscopic view that the weight and depth of life that an artist recognizes should come before the formal excellence of his/her artistic pieces should always be maintained. These criteria are small but great virtues that, thanks to the 25-year artistic career of Lee Yongbaek, people have finally started to recognize. |
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