There is a clear metaphysical tension in the figurative sculpture of Lee Yong Deok.  It may be seen as the tension between opposites -- between the positive and the negative, between light and shadow, between materiality and dematerialization.  From a Taoist point of view, these opposites are really all part of the same phenomenon, the same manifestation of a single energy (qi).  However, in Western philosophy, metaphysics is the category Aristotle chose to describe those phenomena that somehow transcend the logic of physics. Today metaphysics could be described through the infinite computation of time and space at any relative instant, the programming of megabytes in such a way that information assumes authority over its analog predecessors.  Metaphysics is the happenstance of time in the form of a chance encounter within the realm on everyday human experience.  What sets the hybrid sculptural figurations of Lee Yong Deok apart from other pure painters and pure sculptors in the twenty-first century is not only his ineffable grasp of the metaphysical encounter in his work, but his ability to give the ordinary human presence – such as children running, jumping, or observing something at a close distance -- an illusionist form whereby their images become accessible and their intensified movements occupy a solitary position within the space of the frame.  This accessibility relies on the pneumonic principle of the familiar – everyday images of men, women, and children maneuvering their bodies or propelling themselves through time and space.  It is the instant that is caught within the universe of time that carries a visual appeal, what might be called a seduction of the real.  The viewer relates to the familiar everyday impulse of life, and yet within the everyday there is the external connection to the macro-body, the universe of time that extends the presence of the human being into a galaxy of thought and feeling.

          

          In reviewing his prolific body of work of more than two decades, one maybe struck by the science, the mathematics, the intuition, the awareness, and sensitivity that goes into these works.  His animated figures move in and out from the surface.  For the most part, they are created on panels, using mixed media, which include Fiberglas, gypsum, and other elements.  Occasionally he will work with terra cotta, plaster, and wood, depending on the concept and on what the work requires.  As Lee described his work in a recent interview, the surface is always at point zero with the plus and minus at either end.  The figure either protrudes from the surface or is receded into the surface to become a negative space.  This implies that the conflation of existence with non-existence, of being with non-being, as expressed in the Tao Te Ching, which is a central philosophical concern in his work:

 

                              All things are born of being.

                              Being is born of non-being.

 

          In an important interview from 2005, Lee speaks in detail about his philosophical and spiritual processes while conceiving and developing his work. He asserts the following:   “I wanted to demonstrate that the mix of yin and yang could be a way of presenting a solid image. Then, when I observe things in light of this, I find out that everything in the world was formed in the harmony of yin and yang.”  It is through the yin-yang recognition of balance that Lee moves from the world of practicality to the metaphorical universe of feeling, where the figure becomes a recognition of the human impulse through the transcendence of time and space.

 

          Lee’s reference to the Tao Te Ching is not at all accidental, but quite conscious and deliberate. In the same interview he speaks about carving into the forms, that is, carving figures in negative as well as positive space:

 “The three-dimensional work of the yin carving and the yang carving of the two characters is compressed towards the center, so it is the coexistence of the status of the plus and minus.”   The sense of balance in carving the figure is an essential element in the artist’s diurnal work process.  He thinks in terms of time as the necessary added ingredient to form.  The manipulation of the figurative form is as much a technical process as it is a formal one.  It is as much about temporality as it is about practicality. The way a figure is presented has everything to with the way he observes his subjects walk down sidewalks along city streets or relax in their solitude.  With a keen psychological and phenomenological intrigue, Lee observes people in real life until they become a composite of energy through the transference of time to another level of observed reality – a reality that includes movement, intelligence, feeling, and spirituality.

 

          While Professor Lee works in relation to time and the figure, one might say that his sculptural reliefs have a stone-like quality in their absolute intensity, in their residual presence within time and space.  Time and space are relatively bound to one another.  One senses time in the body of a human figure because space exists around it and in relation to it.  If there is no spatial continuity there is no temporality.  Much has been made of Lee’s ability to represent the animation and kinesthetic motion of figures in singular spaces.  Much of his recent work gives this distinct impression, namely, that he is interested in how the singular figure resides in space. 

 

          This, of course, is not his only theme. His history as a singular, independent artist suggests that his figurative imaginary can go in any direction where he feels inspiration and contact with the subject matter.  There are works such as his famous kl.k.7d.24.10.  1920 Berlin (1995) in which a class of young boys, aged 7 or 8, first seen by the artist in an old photograph, taken just after the First World War in Germany, and later transferred into 33 terracotta bodies with heads cast in plaster.  This is a haunting and compelling work – not only because of the transference of time, but also because of the uniformity by which these boys assume a certain psychological intensity in the way they exist all lined up together.  There is a living sense about these figurations.  The artist described how he felt when he saw the photograph in a flea market in Berlin.  The image of these young boys carried him through the window of time where he was connecting with them at the time the photograph was taken.  In some way, his sculptural manifestation of this row of singular figures suggests a power and decisiveness about Lee Yong Deok’s work that carries into the present. 

 

          The issue of transference in Lee’s work is an interesting and important facet of his art.  One could compare his three-dimensional relief sculpture – as, for example, in his recent solitary figures – as having a direct relationship to the positive and negative aspects of photography. Photography, in the most generic sense, is a transference process. An impression is taken from the visible world of time and space, and transferred to an image.  This process may function as a kind of abstract ritual in the same sense that a text-message may function as an abstraction of a genuine greeting between two people; thus, the impression moves from the space of ritual, through a technical or appropriated means, to establish its own space, its own impressionistic referent.  In performing the ritual, the intention of the artist moves toward a state of fluid consciousness in the creative process.

 

          Lee Yong Deok’s figures are a correspondence between the artist’s imagination, a process of envisioning the observed figure transformed into three-dimensional figurations.  In the interview, Lee confesses: “I realized that once I hinted at a negative, the audience would react positively …”  Here the artist refers directly to his idea of art as a “time transportation phenomenon” where the figures become a manifestation of a virtual reality facilitated by digital transport or transference. He says: “In my language, a double denial [negative] is an emphasized confirmation. Here, nonexistence and negation have different meanings; they cannot exist by themselves without an opposite position. That is to say that a double denial is not using the same denial twice, but using the same position.”  So there is a kind of electrical circuitry going on between the precise moment of observation of someone photographed on the street and then transformed from to a digital print to a positive 3-D image to a negative mould to a positive casting observed in real time and space.  One might say that the artist seeks various forms of certainty through his figurations. But then he also expresses an aura of doubt in terms of their perception:

 

                    Is what I see a fact?

                    Is what I am feeling through my sense of touch

                              indeed fact?

                    Is what I am able to perceive indeed fact?

 

          From Lee’s perspective, certainty is never entirely certain.  Even so, there are some basic assumptions that he has learned to accept as a starting 

point, such as acknowledging that all human beings are bound to exist in time and space. As time evolves in relation to the body, the viewer may become aware of the ritual of transference, or what Lee calls “the axis of transfer,” in which past time is transformed into an illusory moment, a concrete reality, and metaphysics where presence and absence operate simultaneously.  In the process of transference from the perceiver to what is actually perceived the reality of existence takes on another level of understanding.  For Lee, the goal of this process is “to realize the existence [of the human form] through non-existence, or, in the world of Lao-tse:

                    

                    We work with being,

                    but non-being is what we use.

 

          The consciousness of perception is entirely dependent on one’s ability to conceive, that is, to hold or suspend, the intentional object of what one has perceived within the mind. The philosopher Edmund Husserl formulated a phenomenological means by which perception is contained by way of reduction in order to become an idea. This idea is an abstraction, the essence (eidos) of the thing or the person that is in the process of being perceived. 

For example, the personages of Lee Yong Deok are realized through a kind of transensory appeal to the senses.  To feel them is to have an idea originally founded on the process of perception where their existence becomes real and where we recognize their existential function.  According to Lee:  “The life of ordinary people is the center of my works, and they are always in the shape of harsh disconnections.”   The shape of their unity is being challenged by the illusion of dualities, by the Western idea of separating the perceiver and the perceived.  In recognizing this conundrum, Lee explains: “Sometimes when you look at a person in action, you should not be confined by his behavior, but should focus on ‘who’ he is and ‘what’ he is trying to present.”

 

          There is a certain openness in the work of Lee Yong Deok that is finally quite astonishing.  His sculpted personages hold expressive intervals that express very complexes variations about time and existence, but from a distinctly Eastern perspective.  The emphasize on negative space and on emptiness are part of the teaching of the Tao Te Ching and of aspects of Buddhist thought as well.  At the same time, Lee understands his playful quotidian figures of men, work, and especially children, as portraying a certain kind of innocence.  What often appears as most childlike, in fact, may appear most complex.  Thus, Lee is searching for the structure of being through non-being, of what is positive through the shroud of negativity, understanding that positive and negative space in a sculptural relief is not merely a formal device for creating an optical illusion.  Rather the transference from positive to negative, and conversely, from negative to positive, gets to the energy (qi) and to the basis of the life-affirming Tao.

 

          There is a passage found in Professor Lee’s Depth of Shadow catalog (2005) where the artist elucidates on his concept of the transportation of time:  “An important point in the transportation of time is that it has to  go through a severance.  This does not mean that time flows or changes, but that it shifts to another time period.  Thus it is not an analogical but a digital 

Change.  This is because it has the principle of digital severance. Digital time and space are different from reality.  Actually, it is an image that is made by breaking down and then [re]assembling a reality called existence.  The creation of an image of this reality means digitizing it.  This is the way the human mind works.”

 

          The deceiving simplicity or childlike innocence in viewing Lee’s projected Fiberglas reliefs carries the full weight of this transportation of time.  His premise is that the creative process is always an exercise in time that requires a specific focus, in his case, an image of the body.  Therefore, the double negative in his work may be attributed to the sense that the figure inhabits a negative space, a planar emptiness that carries an illusory quality.

Whether the forms are convex or concave, there is a persistent depth to these forms.  Whether the eye of the perceiver goes within the human form or around the projected relief, the optical survey is nonetheless a negative process in the sense of searching for the positive energy within emptiness, the perennial life-force of nature emanating through the void.

 

 

 

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NOTES:  The quotations from Lee, Yong Deok included in this essay are taken from two sources: Depth of Shadow, published in conjunction with

the artist’s major exhibition at the National Art Museum of China and the PYO Gallery in 2005, and “Behind the Shadow: Lee, Yong Deok in Conversation with Biljana Ciric,” an undated interview (translated by Shui Jitian and edited by Ali Raleigh Cornell).  The quotations from the Tao Te Ching are taken from the English translation by Stephen Mitchell, published by Harper Collins, 1988.

 

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Robert C. Morgan, Ph.D. is an international art critic, artist and curator.

In 2005, he was awarded a Fulbright fellowship as a senior scholar to research traditional culture as a source for contemporary Korean art.  His book, Art into Ideas (1996), first published by Cambridge University Press, was translated into Korean and published by JRM in Seoul (2007).