Hye Rim Lee
Hye Rim Lee, Powder Room and Lash
In the ongoing series TOKI/Cyborg Project: game, pop and cyber world Hye Rim Lee’s project is the development and increasing sophistication of the avatar TOKI, the world she inhabits and her experiences in it. As a representative fantasy TOKI resides in an unbounded parallel world, one tempered only by the parameters of the technology used to fabricate it.
In Lee’s 2005 project Powder Room TOKI’s facial features and hair are undergoing a makeover. For TOKI this makeover is literally a making at a structural level. The four screens, seen through circular apertures, show aspects of TOKI’s face as it is refined by delicate remodelling, presenting the endless nip and tuck of TOKI simultaneously as a mirror and an observation portal. By showing the construction of TOKI Lee exposes the workmanship, revealing the maturing TOKI as she develops physically to command a wider range of expression and personality. This deliberate exposure of the mechanics of TOKI’s making demonstrates the hyperrealist graphics behind the creation of digital persona allowing Lee to initiate a dialogue about gaming culture, role play, aesthetics, avatars and the technologised body, particularly in relation to the representation of women and the use of cosmetic surgery.
In his essay for the Power Room catalogue sociologist Barry King discussed the creation of the dream self in relation to surgical enhancement.(1) For Lee TOKI operates as a dream self, one that through its malleable hybridity has the ability to shift in its capacity to be representative, enabling Lee to play with tropes of the ideal. TOKI embodies a desirable hybrid of Western and Asian female and animal, personifying a fantasy often demonstrated in anime and manga. In Korean TOKI is the word for rabbit and in Korea the rabbit is associated with the domestic female. TOKI’s rabbit ears also relate to the archetypal Western sex object the Playboy bunny, the reputation of the rabbit for promiscuity and the association of the feminine with the instinctive and irrational animal self. TOKI is a reflection of all these typologies within which we can find ourselves and our attitudes mirrored.
After the refinements of the powder room TOKI has emerged to feature in Lash. The projection echoes the circular ‘mirrors’ in Powder Room, here though TOKI is larger than life. TOKI is disarmingly cute. She is also a vampish seductress. Accompanied by a whiplash sound the gamine TOKI bats her Venus flytrap eyelashes and coos. In Lash the newly finished TOKI has emerged from the digital incubator and has reached a stage of self-recognition. At times she plays to the viewer, at times to the mirror, moving the viewer from participant to voyeur in a typical sexual power play. Her change from cute to sensual, marked by a change in lip colour, hovers seductively between submission and dominance as she explores her newfound self and sexuality. If awareness is power TOKI also represents the argument that recognising your self is an empowering act.
Text by Charlotte Huddleston
(1) See Barry King ‘Cybernetics and Sex’ in Hye Rim Lee Powder Room (ex cat.) Saatchi & Saatchi, The Gus Fisher Gallery, The University of Auckland, TOKI publications, 2006, pp 23-25
Charlotte Huddleston is currently Curator of Contemporary Art at The Museum of New Zealand, Te Papa Tongarewa. Huddleston has previously written about Lee’s work for the Powder Room catalogue, published in 2006. She is currently working on projects with artists Ronnie van Hout and Seung Yul Oh to open on the Te Papa Sculpture Terrace in late 2008 and, along with colleague Megan Tamati-Quennell, a project with James Luna as part of One Day Sculpture (www.onedaysculpture.org.nz).
Details of Work
Lash, video still, 2005
3D animation, 4′ 44″ looped
Courtesy the artist, Starkwhite, Auckland and Kukje Gallery, Seoul
Lash was funded by Screen Innovation Production Fund, A partnership between Creative New Zealand and the NZ Film Commission
Powder Room
Four channel DVD installation, 3D animation, approx. 6 mins each, looped
The Gus Fisher Gallery, Auckland, 2005
Courtesy the artist, Starkwhite Auckland, and Kukje Gallery Seoul
Artist Biography
Hye Rim Lee b. 1963, Seoul, Korea. Currently resides in Auckland, New Zealand. Has a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Intermedia) Elam School of Fine Arts, The University of Auckland, New Zealand. Exhibitions include Crystal City, Diehl Projects, Galerie Volker Diehl, Berlin, Max Lang Gallery, New York (2008);Videoteque, Art Unlimited, Art Basel, Basel (2007); Group Show Part 2, Kukje Gallery, Seoul (2007); The sea that has two names, video art from Korea, Casa Asia, Barcelona, (2006);Fiction@Love <mailto:Fiction@Love> / Forever Young Land, MoCA Shanghai, China (2006); Powder Room, The Gus Fisher Gallery, Auckland (2005). Awards and residencies include International Studio and Curatorial Program artist in residence New York (2007); Screen Innovation Production Fund, A partnership between Creative New Zealand and the NZ Film Commission (2006); Ssamzie Space Studio Programme artist in residence, Seoul, Korea (2006); Arts Board: Creative and Professional Development, Creative New Zealand (2005). Collections include The Museum of New Zealand, Te Papa Tongarewa, Wellington; Coreana Art Museum, Seoul; Saatchi & Saatchi NZ, Auckland; National Museum of Contemporary Art, Gwacheon, Korea; Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, New Plymouth.
Hye Rim Lee is a New York/ Auckland based Korean artist. Her work questions new technology’s role in image making and representation, primarily through game structures and working with 3D animation. Lee reexamines aspects of popular culture in relation to notions of femininity and looks at the way fictional animated identities are propagated within contemporary culture. Her work has conceptually evolved through the representation of TOKI character in her ongoing TOKI/Cyborg Project since 2002. Her evolving computer-generated character TOKI - a female cyborg, through which Lee explores issues of femininity, plastic surgery, projection of desire, control and technological manipulation – she has promised a continuation of her challenge to what she calls the “phallic motivations” of dominant cyber culture, computer gaming, contemporary myth and animamix through her TOKI/Cyborg Project. In so doing she has demonstrated the progressive role an art form can play in the engagement with high technology and popular culture. Lee’s work has been exhibited widely in New Zealand, and also in Asia, Europe and New York.