SEOUL
Pace Gallery
Lee Kun-Yong Form of Now
Beginning in 1975, a young painter named Lee Kun-Yong embraced performance art as an alternative mode of expression, activating gesture and action in some 50 performances proposing an epistemological sensibility based on the experience of the everyday. The logic encapsulated by Lee’s unorthodox practice ran counter to established conventions of art-making— namely, that art should represent something beyond the sum of its labor and materials— exercising a principled skepticism toward the potential for painting and sculpture to spark critical engagement with the sociopolitical realities of the day. Nearly 45 years later, his performances continue to resonate with an unmistakable urgency. “Form of Now,” a concise yet commanding presentation at Pace Gallery’s intimate Seoul showroom, revealed the indelible role of photography in the development and reception of Lee’s oeuvre. Rather than being relegated to a documentary function, the photographs on view were recognized as works in their own right, helping to reshape the discourse around Lee’s practice toward a holistic view of his work. In Logic of Place (1975/2019), a performance recreated by
the artist for the exhibition’s opening, Lee stands and rotates his body to inscribe a circle on the floor. After stepping outside the circle, Lee extends a pointed finger toward the shape in front of him, saying, “There.” Stepping inside the circle and pointing straight down, he declares, “Here,” before stepping through the circle to the other side, reaching behind his head to point backward to the floor, and saying, “Over there.” Finally, having established the connection between physical space, language and the body, he walks along the perimeter of the circle, asking, “Where?” until arriving back where he started. The original photos of this work, installed in a group of four prints inside the gallery’s entrance, lack the linguistic component of the performance, yet clearly speak for themselves. Lee’s gesture starkly punctuates the frame, late-afternoon sunlight raking across his slender figure as he scratches a circle in the dirt of an empty soccer field. With his arm extended in semiotic solemnity, Lee needs no more than a pointed finger to articulate the performance’s sentiment. The literalism of this work invites viewers to question preconceptions linking action and speech to reality, proposing empirical reasoning as the only authentic arbiter of experience. In the 1970s, such thinking represented an implicit challenge to South Korean president Park Chunghee’s military regime, which actively stoked paranoia and suspicion through its arbitrary enforcement of dubious regulations and gave rise to widespread repression of individual autonomy. Lee’s performances during this era acknowledged such forces of suppression, surveillance and control by examining the
LEE KUN-YONG Logic of Place 1975/2019 Four C-prints, 50!×!50 cm each. Copyright and courtesy the artist.
106
ArtAsiaPacific 114
Jul/Aug 2019
banality of everyday gestures and encouraging critical contemplation based on one’s own direct experience, rather than claims made by others, in pursuit of the truth. In a grouping of sizable prints, Logic of Hands (1975/2019), Lee activates this intention by exploring the many ways of putting one’s hands together. The performance presents four configurations for touching hands, which can be enacted by viewers. Mimicking the positions, as shown in the photographs, provides distinct sensory perceptions for the participant. It is a quiet expression reflecting a sociopolitical context in which photography served to mediate truths that can be understood by the body, offering verifiable and incontrovertible depictions of reality in contrast to the fickle machinations of Park’s proclivity for control. Lee’s performances are notable for the potency and poetry of their simplicity, qualities that are also carried in the printed images. The exhibition’s suite of photos for The Method of Drawing (1976/2019), in which the artist creates life-size drawings of his body by deliberately restricting his range of movement, faithfully captures the spirit of Lee’s gesture and authentically conveys the experience of his performance. The photos project a presence, which embodies both an objective record of an event and a didactic manual for reproducing it, while retaining their own agency independent of the drawings they accompany. With candor and clarity, “Form of Now” established Lee’s photography as an autonomous “live medium” capable of captivating audiences with an arresting immediacy. A N DY S T. L O U I S