​‘Upside Down’, How to Live in (sur)reality with our Feet Firmly on the Ground

 

Tonghyun Yu | Art Journalist

 

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“Something is strange. These photographs are portraits we encounter from time to time, well...frequently, but something is odd. The people who are photographed are smiling, yet not; ‘they must be smiling but then again they are not’. The photographs depict people who hold various positions in every corner of society such as firefighters, police officers, pharmacists, bankers, business people, and kindergartners (including normal civilians who we cannot tell by their clothes.) Despite that, their facial expressions are very similar. If they wore the same outfit it might even be hard to tell them apart. Lee Jeeyang’s photographic project Untitled: Upside Down Series seems unfamiliar and strange even though they are portraits with which we are familiar. Why is that?

 

Regardless of its medium in painting or photography, portraiture can be considered one of the genres that is ‘the most’ congruent in the history of Eastern and Western Art. In East Asian art people believed that portraits reveal not only the physical characteristics of an individual but also one’s soul and spirits(傳神寫照); and in western culture people continuously practiced various skills in order to depict distinctive characteristics of the subject, as in the numerous realistic lifelike portraits in Faiyum during the time of the Roman occupation of Egypt. After the invention of the photographic apparatus the field of portraiture advanced dramatically. From Charles Baudelaire’s critical yet enthusiastic discourse of portrait photography’s representation, the concept of Aura that Walter Benjamin introduced, to modern artists such as Richard Avedon, Thomas Ruff, Cindy Sherman, etc., portrait photography has been an attractive yet challenging subject matter.

 

And here, Lee’s portrait photographs can be included. However, in terms of its process and form, there is a vast (or subtle) difference, that is ultimately Lee’s photographs depict people who are hanging upside down. People’s faces in the photographs are distorted subtly due to the effects of gravity and the energy needed to be suspended. Hence, the outcomes of the portraits are unnatural and unfamiliar. The representations of Lee’s work might be similar to Avedon and Ruff’s projects; however, the moment she hangs people upside down the project starts to resist our general norm of portrait photography. This project is called ‘Gravity Series’ because of the invisible dynamic gravity is depicted on the faces of the people. (Once again, the title of the project is Untitled: Upside Down Series and its title in Korean would be called ‘Untitled : upsidedown series.’)

 

Apropos of Lee’s solo exhibition <Stationary Nonstationary> at Gallery AG last year, Park Soon Young compared Lee’s work to Sam Taylor-Wood’s ‘....we can often encounter photographs that deal with gravity such as Taylor-Wood’s Self-Portrait Suspended(2004). However, if Taylor-Wood chose to work with gravitation to feel pleasure from her free movement and empty negative spaces, Lee’s photographs are to express pain and nervousness from psychological pressure and endurance derived from distorted facial expressions.’ The work of Li Wei, a Chinese artist who has recently received attention, can also be considered comparable to Taylor-Wood’s. It similarly pokes fun at earth’s gravity where the intent is to illustrate an atmosphere of wandering freely. In other words, where Taylor-Wood and Wei speak about absolute freedom by ‘removing’ invisible yet existing elements, Lee talks about the limitation of the world by ‘showing’ invisible existence.

 

The Reprisal of Gravity Through ‘Upside Down’

Personally, what I noted was how Lee presented her work. If you are to disclose the evidence of gravity within the installation then you would display the portraits with the heads upturned. Viewers would then be able to subconsciously perceive gravity from the variations of facial expression and posture while looking at the upside down portraits. 

However, Lee reweaves the photographs from the traditional way of presenting portraits that has been used from the past till the present. Simply after taking pictures of people upside down (albeit, she did ask people to have the most natural facial expression possible and also fixed their hair and clothing so they would not fall) Lee presented the work as ‘re-upside-down’, that is ‘Upside Down’ is varied once more. This is a prudent approach in which to present the project. In this way, the photographed people’s subtle facial expressions and postures are more readily discovered. The viewers who might assume that they are looking at traditional portraits are presented with unfamiliar senses from the subtle changes and impressions from the portraits. This is the transition where traditional portraits become unfamiliar and uncanny work.

 

Lee’s ‘backwards’ concept can be found in other works as well. Let’s take a look a 31 SdrawkcaB(2004), Hold Me Tight(2009), and Untitled: Lullaby(2011). 31 SdrawkcaB(2004) is a 3 minutes and 17 seconds long video work that shows one young man playing with two dogs in a yard. At a glance the video looks normal, but if you pay attention you will find it somewhat unnatural. Looking at the title, if you read this seemingly trivial word backwards, we easily discover the project’s intention. The title is the word ‘backwards’ written in reverse. In addition, this video project plays the 3 minutes and 17 seconds long video back to front. The Number 31 in the title indicates it is her 13th work. As time goes by this rather direct ‘backwards’ idea develops conceptually.  Hold Me Tight and Untitled: Lullaby reveal comparisons between shapes and the feelings they evoke and between the nuance of the title and the truth of it. Hold Me Tight is a project that deals with a large adorable teddy bear that girls used to favor. The bear that gives you a feeling of being covered in soft fur is actually enveloped with straight pins, something will happen if you hold it tight as the title suggests. This is the same for Untitled: Lullaby that uses a security blanket hung on a rocking chair. Although you might like to sing a lullaby on the comfortable blanket covered rocking chair the blanket is swathed with straight pins. In the process of deconstructing the plush toy that you played with when you were young, the fainting memory of the object and its original use is evoked. Various comparisons (or ‘backwards’ ideas) that are involved in these projects are the spectrums of Lee’s awareness and feelings about the world that she had while growing up; many corresponding feelings such as joy and fear, familiarity and unfamiliarity, comfort and anxiety, and etc. are blended here. These types of comparisons can also be found in Kaleidoscope Series(2011) where Lee reconstructs fragments of movies she has watched; the scene of attacking birds in Alfred Hitchcock’s movie The Birds, the tiger scene in Isshin Inudo’s Josee the Tiger and the Fish, along with others. Animal scenes in movies usually reveal fear or a dark aspect of reality. In contrast, in Lee’s Kaleidoscope Series those scenes are turned into colorful, fantastical and dream like images. 

 

Against Stereotype, Look Backwards!

Besides the ‘upside down’ concept there is another dynamic that we should note. That is the ‘handmade’ construction. As previously stated, Hold me Tight or Untitled: Lullaby were completed by placing numerous straight pins over many years. Forget-Me-Not(Myosotis)(2010) was realized while Lee was residing in England; she disassembled plush toys that people discarded and reconstructed them. With Lee’s handmade efforts, these eccentrically re-created objects became mediators of remembering the stuffed toys that we once cherished but forgot as we became older. Lee’s methodology towards her work is meaningful because it makes us recognize and live our lives through the sense of touch (as varied from a superficial visual sense) in a more sincere and specific way and to approach it with more stability.

 

Currently, Lee is developing a new project that utilizes the concept ‘backwards’ and objects in memory. Unfolded FIGURE uses origami with letters. Lee unfolds the six folded letters in the word ‘FIGURE’(the concept of ‘backwards’ informed by the unfolding of folded letters) so that viewers can resist the perceived familiarity entered through the eyes. Due to origami’s involvement with hands it evokes Lee’s tactile sensation and although Lee goes against visual familiarity she still follows the customary rule, using ‘the rule of origami’ to traditionally fold and unfold the letters. But why does she employ this established imperative? Lee says by using the traditional rule she reaffirms the world that she has lived in. So to speak, using the rule is the expansion of tactile approaches discussed previously. Through manual construction, Lee feels stable about the world and the use of traditional rules can circumstantially provide a feeling of stability. 

 

For the past decade, the reality of the world has been unforgiving. In the beginning of the 20th century the two World Wars galvanized global doubts and questions among intellectuals and at the start of the 21st century the consequences from the September 11 attacks to the more recent 3/11 earthquake in Japan has made the reality of the world much more surreal. It is a confusing era to understand the reality of the world. Under this circumstance, Lee’s work that looks at the world upside down or backwards stimulates our senses in a strange way so that we can question and resist simple visual bias and stereotype. In addition, Lee’s ‘stitch by stitch’ handmade construction and usage of ‘the origami rule’ might be a reaffirming means to stand resolutely in a world more unrealistic than the movies. That is although we are weak and limited we can be stronger by distrusting and questioning more, and from the laws of nature and gravity it is possible to live and breathe in the world with our feet firmly on the ground.