PHYSICAL CHEMISTRY OF JAE HOON LEE
The physical chemistry of Jae Hoon Lee’s artworks is predicated on digital recordings and his use of technology to change their structure. He compounds images, and sounds, to build up visual effects that question the nature of lived experience and perception. Like the best science fiction, these works are not just about documenting life, but accreting a portrait of potential experience.
Camouflage (2003) is a fascinating mosaic of skin that has almost no register of scale; human skin becomes animal hide, once you get down to macro view. At once monstrous and beautiful, this mural-sized, one-channel video projection gently segues through a dappled palette of different coloured flesh and skin patterning. Lee’s title, Camouflage, cues our cultural fascination with camo’ patterns, a visual link that during wartime and in a context of multiracial-multinational UN-led interventions, has quite startling associations and overtones.
The work’s skin tones morph together to create a mottled mosaic that appears to conform more to chaos theory than to the rules of tessellation or mathematics. Skin tags might float past, before you also notice the distinctive whorl of a fingerprint sliding by amongst the constellation-like galaxy of wrinkles on full body skin. These seductive and slightly repellent visuals skim by to the grinding repetitive ping-hum sound of a flatbed scanner.
It is perhaps this work which most clearly elucidates Lee’s attitude: ‘My body is made of physical matter, I weigh maybe 74kg, but I want to be at the level of a molecule’.1 This desire to dematerialise, to ‘destroy my body with it’, gives the skin videos a sense of self-effacement. The autobiographical nature of these works requires a self-reflexive attitude that cushions the trauma... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline