In psychoanalytical theory, the concept of the "uncanny" refers to the cognitive dissonance of a strange doubleness; an instance of something which is both familiar and yet uncomfortably strange. At the sudden sight of this uncanny, the subject breaks down and doubles: It reacts with horror to the loss of distinction between subject and object, self and other. Accordingly, in double-sided, a solo exhibition by Korean-American artist Timothy Hyunsoo Lee, the artist doubles himself as a multiplicity of ghost identities, transitions and throughways. The early experience of immigration and psychological disorder, placed Lee in a privileged position of radical otherness. Using paper as his primary medium and metaphor, Lee's world appears elastic and volatile, almost at breaking point, yet mysteriously at rest.
The artist draws on his own traumatic experience of anxiety and panic disorders as a child, which then translated into his work as a site of reconstruction: the missed encounter with the real at the heart of trauma can only be explored through repetition and surveying. Expanding his psyche as an abstract territory, Lee maps out cartographies and topologies onto large-scale watercolours which operate as both surface and object. The traditional inertia of classical painting is abandoned for the sake of a sensorial experience engaging all manners of motion and bending, and splitting the gravity of space into an open field of impressions and traces. Beyond the rigid impositions of conceptual art, Lee turns away from reductionism, liberating expression from description.
His expressiveness however is not unbound but meticulous. The painted diamond-like cells, basic unit of his grammar, is a reference to the visual culture of cytohistology - the study of cells and tissues, which maps out mental illness not as a psycho-social condition but as a psycho-biological singularity. The works in the exhibition, loyal to the topological nature of Lee's practice are not a seamless units but a surface in constant growth: spanning between 2012 and 2014, the early and more sculptural works such as Gookeyes, 2012, explore the racial politics of Asians in America, with particular regard to the invisibility imposed on migrant communities: asian eyes are hidden behind white paper, turning our gaze toward a metaphor for rejection and superfluousness.
The subtler, folded sculptural forms deployed in 296.61, 2013, and Halo, 2013, belonging to the series Traces, are based on paintings of traditional Korean spirit masks, investigating identity and representation. How to appear in the world with dual identities? A bearer of conflict? A sufferer of illness? The suffering subject is barely visible or audible. This ghostly presence, however, is synonymous with porosity: the ability to translate and cross-pollinate. In the large watercolor 300.2, 2013, from the same series, a more polymorphous surface begins to appear, attesting to Lee's engagement with the spirituality of Kandinsky, and the outreach for the 'other self', finding solace in the purity of colour and line, and dwelling on his own double-entendre; at a precarious threshold between moderation and madness.
In the most recent works, from the 2014 series Impressions, Composition II and 296.35 the artist has internalized his 'other self', in order to create ever more complex structures, simultaneously abstract and intimate - an architecture of the mind. The sculptures Mother's Craft and Mugunghwa ground the exhibition with a stronger gravitational pull, and materialize his new abstract language into voluminous form. There's no double without devouring, writes Sarah Kofman, without cutting into what, without it, might have passed for a full, self-sufficient presence. The double disfigures the original, disturbs the order between the real world and the presence of art: "Art upsets the opposition between these two worlds, causes each to slip into the other."
Press release courtesy Sabrina Amrani.
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