Lot 1036: LEE LEE NAM

LEE LEE NAM
(b. 1969)
Korean Eight Fold Screen
8 monitors, mixed media, video installation art
198 x 9 x 552 cm. (78 x 3 1/2 x 217 1/4 in.)
edition 1/3
Executed in 2007

Karlsruhe, Germany, Museum of Contemporary Art Karlsruhe, Thermocline of Art. New Asian Waves, 15 June-21 October, 2007.
Gyeonggido, Korea, Gyeonggido Museum of Art, 2007 GMA New Acquisitions Collection Reconstructed, 2008.

Hatje Cantz Verlag, Thermocline of Art. New Asian Waves, exh. cat., Karlsruhe, Germany, 2007 (illustrated, pp. 92-93).
Gyeonggido Museum of Art, 2007 GMA New Acquisitions Collection Reconstructed, Gyeonggido, Korea, 2008 (illustrated, unpaged).

Lee Lee Nam plays with the idea of changes and possibilities in today's society by incorporating contemporary cultural values into his works by making small yet dramatic alterations to their compositions. In 2007, Thermocline of Art New Asian Waves at the Museum of Contemporary Art Karlsruhe, Germany displayed the impact of globalization on contemporary art, in which Lee contributed by reinventing oriental masterpieces into an assortment of dynamic Korean Eight Fold Screen (Lot 1036), bridging a gap between low art and high art by adopting the characteristic of low art- popular culture's music video with high art's academic oriental paintings.

Noting that oriental paintings are abstract landscapes of the mind, Lee portrays his own subjective appreciation of the paintings, but deliberately yet directly shares it in visual narrative, leaving little for the viewer's imagination; hence committing to his contemporary inspiration of medium is the message. Continuing to practice this principle, he tunes the intimacy between sound and image as the visual momentum is escorted by flying butterflies and pink petals flooding across the eight sundry paintings under the conduction of Korean traditional music. In slow grace or in swift passing, these butterflies bestow a sense of color and vibrancy into these typically monotone paintings, presenting a sense of a three-dimensional environment and presence/life, plausibly more so an imitation of life. The aesthetics cannily coincides with his subtle criticism, perhaps even celebration of duplication and simulation; where masterpieces have become a medium moreover a concept through wider and more diversified streams of circulation, even becoming a form of luxury and product, consequently blurring the gap between reality (original) and illusion (duplication). Lee knowingly challenges the authenticity of the image by pledging on Walter Benjamin's simulation theory in praising capitalism and stating that art should be a conscious reflective relationship to mechanical reproduction given that nowadays art is no longer solitarily unique. Lee subtly reveals the social/economic evolution within the viewer's behavior, proving that aesthetic autonomy react to consumption habits as we find ourselves preoccupied and captivated by the moving painting, unconsciously prompting our habits of watching television instead of appreciating the silent aura of traditional paintings. Here, current society's anthropology is reflected by our innate inclination towards invention and change, moreover an inclination towards Lee's new and modern works rather than the original but monotonous masterpieces.