Reality dreams a dream, and the dream imitates reality. It is not someone’s saying but seems like a dream or reality, or perhaps a picture. It is really an obscure situation. There is never any riskily anxiety or piteousness but dramatic adventure or sensual boldness of the story are very highlighted. Reality where the artist exists dreams a dream to produce reality of the dream which again dreams a dream to become reality. This is the impression from Lee Soon Young’s work.

Following the artist, Lee Soon Young’s eyes, you will find little reality which imitates fiction freed from reality as if it were dreaming as the gathering of one aspect of momentary memories about the space she stayed. As the shaking of the fragile reality gets help from the installation of miniature objects, lighting, and photographing, ‘Living RoomS' with dramatic expression of strong adventure is unfolded. It is the space of dramatic reality reproduced with miniatures to actualize the imaginary world she has in mind. It makes the border of reality and virtuality obscure, or it degraded the border itself into nothing. Frustration resulted from the need that cannot be reproduced in real life is derived and begun with all the objects or devices. And the wings of imagination become complete after all with the space of reality consisting of reality becoming imagination based on reality and containing narrative. Again, when the space is scanned with the pictures that drive the space into the border of reality and virtuality, it gives all in front of the work the pleasure spurting out from each symbol and the doubt to interpret reality and virtuality. This is possible because it is the story imagined by the artist taking reality as the basis, and it is also the reason why miniature installation was used to actualize the imaginary story. The space of miniatures is not virtual but real, and it imitates the virtual state with images. To wit, the need originated from imagination is just reality of impulse resembling virtuality.

The Room Gained from Moved Reality

Artist Lee Soon Young raises and imagines all she has as clues for her work. She has imagined freely from the journey of her work living in France in her childhood and up until now, in the plainly, personal space of a room. For instance, watching the room full of forest with trees growing and coming through the wall and the curtain blowing in the wind in a late afternoon, she imagines her room as a ship heading for somewhere in the ocean. What grows the worries of insomnia to radish sprouts! It is the event of imagination taking as the subject and following obediently her own free consciousness system that requires no control or power for self-reflection and also the room of the artist ‘Lee Soon Young’ reproduced as an event of reality. It is the room that she lived and now lives. That ‘Living RoomS’ is the space replaced with the frame that embraces all she has and also is the womb in the beginning. The feel of the womb in the beginning is the space perceived as the clue of instinct which does not exist in anyone’s memory; thus, Lee Soon Young’s room can exist as a complex space, neither reality nor virtuality. And it comes to have the narrative of fiction and nonfiction given from strangeness. ‘Lee Soon Young’s room’ is the place where she herself exists and her viewing and imagination begin and also the place where her viewing of the room as the other exists at the same. She designs and actualizes intangible imagination gained from being parasitic on reality as a tangible cubic, and she witnesses herself becoming the other recording that reality with images. The space of ‘RoomS’ originated from her own needs also becomes the ‘fantasy room’ corresponding to the general other’s needs from the moment when she becomes the other.

- Kim Jae Won