HYE RIM LEE

Crystal City Spun is a spectacle of sexually charged stimuli, which opens with a cityscape of spinning dildo towers. Out of the landscape emerges Dragon YONG, a vehicle for fantasy exploration by TOKI, a highly stylized, curvaceous, warrior-cum-vixen who draws upon the Japanese tradition of Manga, Korean animamix and Western ideals of sexuality and beauty.

The video has a playful, childlike quality alluding to fantasy and toys such as pink bunny rabbits and digitally exaggerated reflections. But at the same time, Lee explores sexual innuendo and plays with varying degrees of sexuality and sexual expression both with imagery and color. The video utilizes the latest techniques in 3D digital technology creating some characters in “crystal” structure, lending the work a delicacy and elegance.

Although the artist’s work is rooted in the challenges facing the Asian community who have settled in New Zealand, the work also speaks to the manipulation and perception of female sexual identity worldwide. Furthermore, Lee challenges the conventions of the traditionally male-dominated worlds of game structure and 3D animation, specifically when it comes to virtualized images of women. Crystal City is a project in which cyberculture and contemporary myth-making intersect.

Hye Rim Lee is a New York-based, Korean-New Zealand artist. Her recent exhibitions include: Glasstress 2011, Collateral Event, 54th Venice Biennale; Future Pass, Collateral event, 54th Venice Biennale (2011); Momentum Collection, Collateral Event, 54thVenice Biennale (2011); Indomitable Women, Off Loop, Francesca Bonnemaison Cultural Centre, Barcelona, Spain (2010); MONA Inners Space, National Museum in Warsaw, Poland (2010); Beyond Mediations, II Mediations Biennale, Poznan, Poland (2010); New Stories from the Edge of Asia: Plastic Life, San Jose Museum of Art, San Jose, USA (2010); Animamix Biennial- Visual Attract and Attack, MOCA Taipei, Taiwan, MoCA Shanghai, Shanghai, MoCA Kaohsiung, Taiwan,Today Art Museum in Beijing, China (2009); Mind Topology, National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, Taipei (2009); The International Incheon Women Artists’ Biennale, Incheon, Korea (2009); Paradise is elsewhere, ifa-Galerie Stuttgart, ifa-Galerie, Berlin, Germany (2009); and The Subject Now, curated by Tina Barton, at the Adam Art Gallery, Victoria University of Wellington NZ (2008).