| Plastic Mechanism and Futuristic Imaginations-Sung-Ho Kim | |
| Plastic Mechanism and Futuristic Imaginations Sung-Ho Kim, Art Critic (Translated by Hyungwook Chun, J.D.) The title of this exhibit of Mr. Ikryeol Lee, Systems of Capitalism, is heavy. As the title sounds that of a book on sociality, choosing it as the title of an exhibit of a painter looks even reckless. Notwithstanding, the title is proper in explaining the paintings of Mr. Lee, who has ceaselessly been delving into the relationships between the modern civilisation and human being. This heavy and serious title covers the subjects of his entire exhibits in the past and present. The subjects related to civilisations of machines (Machine Begins (1987), Phantom of Machine (1989) and Machine Smoke (1990)), cityscapes (Cityscapes New York (2013) and Cityscapes Seoul (2013)) and human being and capitalism (Memories of Systems (2014) and Personality vs. Sociality (2015) and Blue Planet (2015)) let the paintings of Mr. Lee be interconnected in gigantic systems of capitalism. Systems of Capitalism and Egoistic Artist Take a look at his paintings. Scenes of Formula 1 racing and speeding racers full of sense of speed, modern cityscapes from the viewpoint of car drivers, modern people busily moving around, future cities imagined from the contemporary buildings and people residing in the cities keep entering into and escaping from the visualizations of Systems of Capitalism that Mr. Lee has been building. That’s right. Systems of Capitalism, which is discovered in his paintings, become clearer when he focuses humans coexistent with landscapes of cities, machines and the virtual world. These humans are capitalistic beings who flee from the obligations of their community and those who used to be subject to criticism in the past when the common goals were mainly about the benefits of the community. In the contemporary world, “individualistic humans” are urgently summoned for the benefits of each individual as the common goal. Has not Ayn Rand said, “Capitalism is a social system based on the recognition of individual rights, including property rights, in which all property is privately owned.”? “Capitalism” from the libertarian viewpoint of Rand is a theory of rights arising from individualistic humans. It is not altruistic and is rather egoistic. In other words, capitalism confidently discloses its egoistic purposes such as the right to oneself, which is the right to own her own body and intelligent capabilities, and the right to property, which is the right to voluntarily obtain and maintain her own property. Mr. Lee said, “An artist is the most egoistic and narcissistic person of all and also is an enthusiast, otaku and hikikomori. An artist has many things in common with those unusual people who have changed the world.” This statement is not so different from the stance of Ayn Rand, who supported capitalism by asserting the rights to oneself and property and individualistic humans. Discourses of capitalism have transformed from merchant capitalism (the 16th century) through industrial capitalism (the second half of the 18th century), through monopoly capitalism (the 19th century) and modified capitalism (the second half of the 20th century), to globalisation and Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century of today. We also remember that during the period of this transformation, socialism arose against threats of monopoly capitalism such as abuses of monopolistic corporations, failures of small and mid-size businesses and increase of unemployment. Systems of Capitalism that Mr. Lee presents to us is the various types of modern and current capitalism. Mr. Lee maintains Systems of Capitalism, the macro-theme of his paintings, from the idea of liberated-style painting to that of painting protesting capitalistic profits, covering both individualism and a public good: “The visual complexities of my paintings… symbolise human being’s faith in Systems [of Capitalism] and perfect utopia, which is an organism that is alive pursuant to the rules prevailing in the each and every element in Systems [of Capitalism].” Mechanical Paintings and Plastic Mechanism In his paintings, Mr. Lee intends to conceptually express Systems of Capitalism and visually express systems alive as an organism through complex, but liberated styles. How does he achieve this? In his simple act of painting, he discovers a way to express his imaginations freely and fastest and put his deepest faith in such way. He compares maintaining the property of the act of painting to “driving and keeping balanced a car that is reaching its limits in cornering in order to maintain its fastest speed possible right before its slip at the corner” and searches for the aesthetics of balancing as a way of expression. Mr. Lee in fact paints cars on canvases. He searches for the potentials of dynamic scenes in various ways, specifically painting the images of races and drivers of Formula 1 and rally machines by expressionistic fast strokes of his brushes on canvases building textures on them. The shapes of sports cars and racers disappear being mixed with backgrounds by strokes of brushes and mix of colours and reappear like ghosts. This is not all. He also directs the scenes where the barriers between objects and background and between space and time are demolished, for example, by frequently overlapping car headlamps and landscapes around the road and racers wearing helmets and dusty-flying landscapes. I would call Mr. Lee’s paintings as “paintings of machine” or “mechanical paintings.” What is the reason that I look at the term “machine” through the terms of mechanics? The reason is that he expresses movements of machines as if he has transfused blood into the machine bodies and blown life into them rather than merely describing precise connections and interactions of machine parts like coldly drawing blueprints of the machines. While Mr. Lee’s disbelief in human being, which arose from his certain experiences in his early twentieth, made him focused on mechanical paintings, his interest in them originated from what he experienced as a teenager, which was, for example, assembling plastic model kits of cars and airplanes, watching science fiction movies and drawing science fiction cartoons. In his recent paintings, Mr. Lee summons the realistic and unrealistic science fiction-like imaginations of futuristic worlds from the time he was a teenager and builds his works with the imaginations. Those imaginations, such as a portrait of Mr. Lee himself, who is a half-cyborg, future cities floating in the space and future structures like cutting-edge science research stations, always make him excited. We may call the images of the paintings plastic mechanism. Plasticity means to be a quality of an object that does not return to the previous shape of the object after its shape has changed by receiving certain outside power, which is bigger than the limit of elasticity of the object. Irreversibility, one of the properties of synthetic materials like plastic, continuously leads paintings of Mr. Lee toward futuristic imaginations. Fake or artificial, which plastic may mean, present us the aesthetics of Simulacre, which is fictitious, but more real than reality itself. What we should remember is that this futuristic imaginations, which synchronizes imaginative play from his childhood and his sprit of painting, blossomed relatively recently. The dual implications that his recent imaginative play has continuously give us certain questions. It is interesting to look at the dual implications of his paintings, i.e., the messages of harmony and conflicts that lead instincts of staying and moving between cityscapes and cars, individuals and sociality in cityscapes and utopia and dystopia in future cities. I want to witness what synergy effects these dual implications will create, proceeding into futuristic imaginations. If I may add one more thing, I believe the reason these multiple implications deliver the atmosphere of utopia more than that of dystopia at the boundary of utopia and dystopia is that Mr. Lee has rather broad spectrum of views of the world working as a landscape designer, car racer and columnist for automobile-related media, not merely as a painter. |
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| The story of a systems-Choi Chul-joo | |
| The story of a systems The structure of the painting is a system that tells the difference between a sensible form of detail. This is an image of the whole(systema) and order(ordnung) which has been repeated in ancient Greece as an image. Thus, the system in the picture is a set of structural relationships of the image, but the overall shape of the moulded order according to the established principle. A separate form of the picture in the system is a subsystem that forms a picture to form a structure. This has an organized social area, consisting of the structure of a painting system, equating to the organisation. The structure left behind last era is a city. This leaves a form in architectural structure. This is a space in the background of that era, which forms a separate space in the system. A city built like this, reveals the phenomenon of a city in architecture, but it is artificial as a picture. Therefore, Lee Ik-ryeol wants to talk about a system of painting. This starts with a meeting of structures in order to form a form of order. He visits the system of painting in a city like a computer. Lee Ik-ryeol orchestrates the structure of urban architecture by painting the structure of the city's complex structure as a painting system. To convey the city image in the form of a structure, he paints the city's landscape of architecture in order to gain access to an art structure. This is a system that is interlocked to architecture structures as relational paintings. In this exhibition, Lee Ik-ryeol tries to draw up a system of architecture in the city. This is painting system where the structure of a painting system forms a structure and forms a city. The invisible urban system is represented as a an iconic image of visible architecture in the sturucture of painting system. However, the painting disappears with the actual sturucture, the city is stuck with the impression of an iconic image. In other words, the images of an impressive city translate into architectural imagery as animpressive manifestation of his desire He remains in the category of realism and conventional impressions that show the stage of light and shade. Therefore, he is influenced by urban impressions as the subject of the relationship to the relationship of the painting system. This is not the object of painting, but the object of painting as urban impressions. Thus, he can paint the impressive urban impressions of the present when he goes over the conventional impression of the past. The system refers to the structure of the impression of the image of the buildings equating the city's impressions of the urban impressions. He refers to a painting of a pictorial system in line with the notion that it transcends a symbolic structure beyond a conventional image of a conventional impression. And his impression paint a structured building around the city's reality. Writing. Choi Chul-joo |
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ARTIST Criticism
