The Mechanism of Time Created by Superimposition of Images

- Sook-jeen Oh (Director, Brain Factory)

A naked child climbs up a wooden plank leaning obliquely against the wall. With his both arms outstretched to the sides of the stick and his legs flexed, the boy seems to be quite enjoying the rod climbing. As he reached midway through, suddenly, he puts his arms together and swims all the way up. Leaving behind the audience, who are captivated by his cute and adorable appearance from behind, the boy holds on to the plank again, and quickly disappears to the top. On the surface of the wooden plank, where the protagonist was once drawn with graphite and now gone, the trace of the eraser in grey remains to replace the lingering resonance. This work of art is called (2009), which is represented as the title of the exhibition. The whole story begins again when the boy’s one-minute-journey repeats as he re-appears at the bottom of the plank after the disappearance at the top. In this two-channel video installation, the boy’s movement is presented in close-up view on the left, and the whole wooden plank is shown on the right such that the viewers can observe him climbing up at a long distance. The boy’s movement, which the artist presumed the ‘daily life’, symbolizes our every day and illustrates the core of Kakyoung Lee’s works that reveal the daily life, its repetition and passion. The artist introduces nine video installations at the current exhibition which consist of pencil drawings and animation movies, created by connecting sequences of achromatic drypoint prints. These works can be categorized into two different contents. One is the daily lives of common New Yorkers the artist observed while living in New York, and the other is the ‘performances’ that are in line with the ‘psychological everyday life’ of the artist herself. Former includes the works such as that depict the everyday scenes of the surroundings. The latter includes the works such as <Dance, Dance, Dance,>or <Walk-2010> that were made by filming performances and then translating them into animations. In most of the performances, repetitive movements of the body are used as materials. An installation work is also shown at the exhibition as a mini project. Here, the artist draws a window on the wall and projects a video on the gap of the open window. Additionally, together with a work that shows a scene of Grand Central Station, New York, at around 10 am, a Five-Channel animation presents scenes from 5 different subway stations. In order to create a succession of images, most of the early works made with pencil drawings were recorded one cut after another, where each image was rubbed off with an eraser for a new sequence to be drawn on the same paper. Consequently, this process leaves intact traces of time represented by the smudges of eraser. The works created using drypoint technique reveal the concept thoroughly. Because drypoint is a printmaking technique based on thin line drawing, when an image is incised into a copper plate and then the next sequence is incised on the same plate, the former image is not completely erased but leaves fairly clear traces. This characteristic of the technique allows time inside the screen to flow but not disappear, and produces an effect of technical coexistence between present and past. The effect provides the basic premise of the everydayness that the artist claims. In particular, the idea that our every day falls as soon as it rises and repeats in the same space with only difference in time relates exquisitely with her technique. Thus, the notion of time in her works transcends the general concept of time, and possesses the charm of crossing freely over past and present. Through the labor-intensive process, in which the artist connects five frames of images per second in order to make a moving image from hand-made prints (or drawings), the viewers come to understand that the world of daily life created in the screen and Lee’s everyday life creating it are organically circling.