《Off-line IMAGE》

In defense of the invisible When it comes to photography, most artists’ primary interest is in the way that images are seen and captured – how variables like light, depth of field, scale, composition and context influence our perception. But what about images that are not meant to be seen at all? Images designed to be invisible, overlooked or misread? Such concerns are central to the multidisciplinary art practice of Julian Kyusang Lee, whose creative outlook is indelibly tethered to a worldview shaped by personal experience. Born in Seoul, Lee spent his formative years as an adolescent in Cape Town, South Africa, where he and his younger brother were the only Asian students at their school. While South Africa is by no means an ethnically homogeneous country, the cultural and linguistic differences between Lee and his classmates were particularly pronounced, making him constantly aware of his status as an interloper. Years later, Lee would face similar circumstances after moving to Germany to attend the Leipzig Academy of Fine Arts, where his artistic philosophy was forged in response to his identity as a perpetual outsider. A key motif throughout Lee’s early oeuvre from this period derives from chroma key, a technique for compositing multiple images into a single frame, typically using a green screen. The chroma key process isolates a photographic subject from its background, which is later replaced with another image in post-production so that the original background is rendered invisible. By inserting abstract green forms into his images, Lee visualizes that which is destined to remain unseen, a posture that he found increasingly resonant amid the Western milieux of South Africa and Germany. His chroma key works thematize the precarious sensibility of living on the periphery, thereby implicating dominant modes of visual perception and the social conditioning upon which they are premised. For Lee, the constant confrontation of one’s own image being neutralized in the public gaze led to a natural predilection for challenging the status quo. Foregrounding something like chroma key – which has become so ubiquitous in contemporary visual culture that there is even a specific shade on the Pantone spectrum which serves as the industry standard – is a shrewd strategy that drives to the heart of Lee’s critical inquiry into the role of images in today’s society. Who decides what we see, and on what basis? At what point is an image considered complete, in other words, suitable for distribution and consumption? And what is the fate of images that are systematically forbidden from entering the public sphere? Considering such questions, Lee’s appropriation of photographic focus charts as a secondary visual motif assumes newfound urgency, presenting these anodyne tools of the trade as polemical subjects unto themselves. The abstract, greyscale compositions of focus charts convey indeterminate depths of meaning. To photographers, they serve as essential implements for establishing a precise depth of field through their lens and thereby reducing an element of guesswork within their workflow. They serve as tools for imbuing photos with an unimpeachable sense of reality – tools which are always removed from the frame before the final image is captured. Lee, however, insists on presenting these temporary stand-ins as fully-fledged protagonists, often unadulterated and without any context that might undermine their neutrality. Construed as exhibition-ready images, they assert their own legitimacy and intrinsic value as objects that are meant to be seen. This is where topics of authorship and intention in Lee’s oeuvre enter the broader cultural discourse regarding the origin of images and how their meanings change over time. A fundamental symptom of living in an age when images can be searched, cross-referenced and manipulated – and thus made to support any number of predetermined interpretations – is the cognitive dissonance that manifests whenever we are confronted with something that seems incompatible with contemporary codification. Despite our efforts to distill visual stimuli into neatly organized semantic categories, there are nonetheless incongruous instances of man-made imagery that persistently resist such neural proclivities. For all of us, certain images embody an irrational potency – whether they touch something buried deep within our subconscious or are so idiosyncratic that they compel a closer look, holding our gaze and gripping our psyche. While the aforementioned cases may suffice as contemporary examples of as-yet unresolved epistemologies of visual language, Lee grounds his most recent foray into perceptual precarity in a source far removed from photographic means of production. Rather than invoking the mechanical dimension of image-making, he looks to the abstract iconography of Bronze Age inhabitants of the Korean Peninsula, whose petroglyphs in the outskirts of present-day Ulsan have proven inscrutable to modern-day scholars. These rock carvings are singular in their non-representational imagery, particularly in contrast to other nearby depictions of marine and land animals, delineating circular patterns that seem to serve no practical purpose. These images bespeak an untold truth. While they worldview they reflect may be lost on our modern-day semantic lexicon, they remain nonetheless valid as visual signifiers, even if their meaning remains illegible to contemporary viewers. Their truth resonates with Lee on a visceral level, as someone whose own story has so often been deemed extraneous. In his artworks, imagery that would otherwise be expunged from the public eye assumes an indispensable function in guiding the eye toward a more critical mode of perception, one indiscriminate in its correlation to cognitive hierarchies, insisting that anything which can be seen is deserving of equal attention, no matter how unfathomable it may be. **\-**Andy St. Louis (Frieze House Director)