Working in art means pushing the borders of whatever medium you work with and sometimes this exploration will expose the medium’s limitations. Whether that is painting or the latest digital technologies, each has their specific shortcomings that reflect back upon the medium itself and the way we interact with it. Sojung Lee (1995, Seoul) started with painting but this quickly left her dissatisfied and that’s how she switched to working time based media such as performance and video. She explores the invisible social structures that are behind superficial phenomena. We spoke with the recently graduated artist to get to know more about her and her work.
“I studied Oriental Painting for my Bachelor in South-Korea, which had a focus on traditional Korean painting. It was a conventional programme and I learned to do things such as making paint and pigments with my bare hands. I enjoyed learning these skills but while I was working on my graduation project I got interested in less tangible things such as time, non physical objects and my personal feelings. And I started to realise that painting was too static a medium for I was looking for something more fluid and dynamic, something that would allow me to talk about ephemeral things. This search for new media is also how I ended up enrolling in the MADtech Masters programme at the Frank Mohr Institute in Groningen. The programme is renowned to be very open and experimental and as I was going through a transition period within my artistic practice, I figured this programme would be very well suited for my needs.
Being an artist keeps me from living a normal and boring life that lacks critical thinking. Sojung Lee
“During my study at MADtech I tried all different kinds of media and took a variety of technological courses such as an introductory course using Arduino, which is an open source electronics platform that can be used to build interactive digital devices. At one point I was working with a 360 degree camera and I noticed a small detail in the image, nothing more than a dot, which happened to be the tripod where the camera was fixed upon. It almost felt like a hole or port that was connected to another world or reality. This realisation triggered my interest in the discrepancies that exist within digital media. How seemingly incompatible things can manage to exist at the same time within the digital realm. These kinds of ironies then became a focus of my artistic research.
“In general there is a big gap between how we experience digital images and the physical world. For example; During a holiday I saw an anthill on a mountain in France, which impressed me a lot as I had never seen anything that big made by such tiny, struggling creatures. I took a short video of it and went home with the idea that I could use digital images to make a work of art about this anthill. As I was working on my research I began to feel that all these digital images were empty and illusionary, and couldn’t match the feeling that I felt when confronted with the original thing, the actual anthill. I missed that moment of sensing it physically, and whatever else I found on the computer couldn’t match that feeling. So instead I opted to make an anthill myself and invited the ants to come on over. They didn’t, of course, but that’s irrelevant to the purpose of the work. Using these kinds of fictional or imaginary narratives merely serve as a trigger point for people and creates space for them to start using their own imagination. These strategies bring you closer to the original experience than any digital image might.
“Currently I am working on a video that I will present at the end of November at Kriterion, a small independent cinema in Amsterdam. I am investigating why people are fascinated by the cliché ridden thing that is Kdrama. I never understood why people like them because they’re very obvious in plot and lack any kind of creativity, but I suspect it’s because people want to consume light entertainment as their lives are already complex and tiring. It’s interesting to me how media culture contradicts the way we actually live our lives. In my artistic practice I like to contemplate these types of things. In fact, it’s one of the reasons why I like being an artist, as it prevents me from living a normal and boring life that is devoid of criticality. As long as I keep thinking critically, and keep questioning everything around me, it feels like I am alive.”
Atelier, workshop, studio… The space in which an artist works is a place where, day in, day out, people are plodding, planing and measuring. Where a creative product is created and where people think. In this series, visit Groningen artists at their workplace. What are they currently working on?