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HYE RIM LEE
Hye Rim Lee’s work questions new technology’s role in image making and representation. Her work is consistent with recent international developments in contemporary art, e.g., reviewing aspects of popular culture in relation to notions of femininity and looking at the way fictional animated identities are propagated within contemporary culture. Her work has developed through the critical and conceptual evolution of her animated character TOKI, the principal component of her ongoing TOKI/Cyborg Project (2002-present).
Lee has positioned her work at a progressive interface between East and West by exploring areas of computer gaming, cyber culture, contemporary myth-making and animamix. She has exhibited in major international exhibitions, including the Incheon Women Artists Biennale (2009), Glasstress, 53rd Venice Art Biennale (2009), Kukje Gallery, Max Lang Gallery NY, MoCA Shanghai, Millennium Museum, Beijing, Art Basel, and the Armory Show NY.
OBSESSION / LOVE FOREVER
2007, Eight individual High Definition 3D Animation Pieces with Sound, Total duration: 11 min 27 sec
“Obsession,” named in part after a Calvin Klein perfume by the same title, reflects on two ideas also common to the perfume market: love and eternity. Subversively humorous, these 3D animations avoid cliché, mass-market depictions of obsession in favor of unsettlingly simplistic designs. By interweaving the pop and fashion industry’s vision of beauty with modern myths created through gaming and cyber platforms, Lee tackles technologized modes of perception in contemporary culture.
As digital tools and scientific progress alter the visual vocabulary of beauty standards, how might our language concerning time-tested concepts like love simultaneously evolve?
Initially exhibited at MOMENTUM Sydney, “Obsession / Love Forever” has since been donated and shown on Sky Screen Berlin, the Collegium Hungaricum and Istanbul. -Josephine English Cook
Obsession/ Love Forever aspires to come to terms with our contemporary vision of beauty by examining the crossover between the fashion industry’s construction of norms and contemporary myth created in cyber culture and computer gaming. My project is continuation of my on going series TOKI/Cyborg Project (2003~) which questions new technology’s role in image making and representation. My digital character TOKI parodies the idealisation of female form in Asian manga and anime, computer gaming and cyber culture. TOKI’s body has been cut into pieces – posing coyly to sit, move and beckon in the perfume bottle. The parts of the body become a product of beautification and commodity conflating power and seduction. The animated body parts parody the obsession with beauty created by phallic motivations in cyber culture and gaming, with the work referencing critical contributions from contemporary mythology, psychoanalysis, technology, cybernetics, aesthetics, plastic surgery, feminism, consumerism and eroticism.
The project features digital 3D animations consisting of 8 DVD projection installations and experimental sound connected to a surround sound system. Each DVD features an animation sequence of different parts of TOKI’s body captured and reacting with particles in a collection of perfume bottles. Each DVD is QuickTime DV PAL/NTSC format. The duration of DVD is approx 2 minutes.
Each DVD of animation conveys ideas and concept behind the project. The animated body parts express, with a slightly ironic turn, commenting male desire and voyeuristic fantasy as well as female fantasy of presenting body as a commodity. Each DVD plays with and accentuates the slippery separations between dominance and desire, fantasy and fear, and birth and death.
The DVDs are:
DVD 1. Hand in Moschino perfume bottle
DVD 2. Lips in Chance perfume bottle Eye in perfume bottle
DVD 3. Eye in Chopard Wish bottle
DVD 4. Breast in Lou Lou perfume bottle
DVD 5. Eye in J’adore perfume bottle
DVD 6. Legs and shoes in Channel No. 5 perfume bottle
DVD 7. Bottom in Poison perfume bottle
DVD 8. Genitalia in Comme des Garcons perfume bottle
All the perfume bottles are modelled to look slightly different from the reference of the actual model of commercial designer perfume.
Conceptual background
“Between love and madness lies obsession.”
Charles Levin, Obsession, A scent of style: Some Thoughts on Calvin Klein’s Obsession (four 15 second commercials on video)
In the title of the project Obsession is named after perfume by Calvin Klein and love and forever are common words/themes for perfumes. Touching on the humorous or surreal, the works have significantly steered clear of clichés of the psychological definition of obsession; rather they explore the theme with a mixture of seriousness and delicacy.
The project aspires to come to terms with our contemporary vision of beauty by examining the crossover between the fashion industry’s construction of norms and contemporary myth created in computer gaming and cyber culture. In the age of computer, online-games and the internet, digitalization and computerization have changed our environment, our viewing habits, modes of perception and fashion in contemporary pop culture. Digital technology and scientific progress have tried to create the absolute perfect vocabulary of beauty. The project seeks to investigate ideas about the relationship between beauty, perfection, and technological progress.
The project features 8 DVD animations of parts of TOKI’s body captured in the collection of perfume bottles; an obsessive collection of fetishes. Fetishized beauty trapped in perfume bottles, is the fascination that holds the desire for closure, power and logical perfection, is closed and ritualized.
Hye Rim Lee’s perky Manga and computer game heroine inspired doll-like TOKI has cut her body into pieces, posing coyly, sitting, moving and beckoning in the perfume bottle. These “body parts” are a departure from the clean lined and highly stylized female figure, revealing the smoothness and awkwardness of plastic, synthetic and fantastic 3D animation modeling techniques, thereby commenting on the creation of a contemporary mythology and the representation of the female body form. The parts of the body become a product of beautification and commodity, conflating power and seduction. The artist uses a popular vocabulary of the fetishized female body to complicate notions of the erotic with a very vulgar modeling of the figure. The body parts parody obsessive beauty created by phallic directions in cyber culture and gaming. The animated body parts express, with a slightly ironic turn, comments on male desire and voyeuristic fantasy as well as female fantasy; of presenting the body as a commodity. The works involve critical contributions from contemporary mythology, psychoanalysis, technology, cybernetics, aesthetics, plastic surgery, feminism, consumerism and eroticism.
Eyes (DVD 3 and 5) can be a projection of desire and give the sole power of the gaze from the viewer taking in woman’s power. Long fingernail (DVD 1) and high heels (DVD 6 and the sound of the exhibition) are the masculinization of the woman’s desire to satisfy the viewer’s desire. The dynamic interplay of looks is confrontational and has a darker vision than just mere parody of the male gaze; alluding to the impending victimization or fantasization of women’s desires – implementing pleasure of passivity and of subjection, thereby reinforcing a phallic economy of desire. Each DVD plays with and accentuates the slippery separations between dominance and desire, fantasy and fear, and birth and death. The video installation is made of the body, of desire, of the sexual, of the fluid, of movement and of sound, and my ongoing motif.
TOKI/Cyborg Project (2002~)
Obsession/ Love Forever is continuation of my on going series TOKI/Cyborg Project. The project questions new technology’s role in image making and representation. I provocatively interpret the way in which popular culture promotes the myth of transformative processes that offer the attainment of a virtual and constructed physical perfection. My digital character TOKI parodies the idealisation of female form in Asian manga and anime culture, computer gaming and cyber culture. The project explores the contemporary myth created in cyber culture and computer gaming. The project scrutinises the links between video games and popular culture and presents a discussion on the impact of games on popular culture.
My project focuses on the creative process of computer game design and explores the artistic development of game concepts. The project explores the link between new technology – its role in production and content – and popular culture. It aims to produce innovations by seeking to fuse the use of new media with unexplored areas of popular culture and the inner worlds of the private individual. The viewer will be led into a fantasyland and an imaginary space where a journey will be explored through psychologically and sexually charged sites. The imaginary space starts from alternative realities and moves to a virtual dreamy fantasy world where desire, happiness and anxiety are explored in many different ways. My project aims to deepen game concepts by merging them with art and life. By taking the game off the console and into an installation space an intimate connection between the viewer and game characters will be produced and the subsequent emotional and psychological responses explored. – Hye Rim Lee