Hyungkoo Lee goes mad scientist in his latest exhibition

BUSAN — Hyungkoo Lee is a scientist under the guise of an artist. The 53-year-old centers his delicately detailed artwork on the concept of the human body. Lee has previously displayed his works at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary..

″Face Trace 003″ (2012) has Hyungkoo Lee's own deconstructed facial features plastered onto a portrait bust. [BUSAN MUSEUM OF ART]

BUSAN — Hyungkoo Lee is a scientist under the guise of an artist.

The 53-year-old centers his delicately detailed artwork on the concept of the human body. Lee has previously displayed his works at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Samsung’s Leeum Museum of Art and the Korean Pavilion of the Venice Biennale in 2007.

Stepping into his solo exhibition at the Busan Museum of Art (BMA) in Haeundae District, Busan, titled “Highlighting Korean Contemporary Artist IV – Hyungkoo Lee,” it would be an understatement to simply define it as an art show.

″Pink Vessel″ (2022) [BUSAN MUSEUM OF ART]

Lee's oeuvre resembles a science museum or laboratory. A large squiggly pink installation titled “Pink Vessel” (2022) (which looks a lot like an intestine) greets visitors in the entrance. Next is the “Animatus” (the Latin etymology for animation) series, which is in a very dark room and showcases skeletons.

Although they are obviously skeletons of animals, they have abnormally large heads and are posing in humorous ways. If you use your imagination, you'll see that they are actually the skeletons of popular animated characters like Tom and Jerry, Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck.

″Lepus Animatus″ (2006) is the skeleton of Bugs Bunny. [SHIN MIN-HEE]

Last December, BTS’s V posted a photo of Lee’s “Canis Latrans Animatus” (2006) on his Instagram calling it Dooly the Little Dinosaur. However, the piece actually depicts the skeleton of Wile E. Coyote, the cunning coyote always chasing after the Road Runner in Looney Tunes.

Lee created the bone-like materials from resin and painted them. Each piece of bone was then precisely arranged to reenact the animated characters’ dynamic scenes, like Sylvester the Cat jumping up toward Tweety. Lee achieved this by first studying the movements of the animations and then inferring their skeletal structures.

“Lee majored in fine arts and has no prior expertise in anything related to science or archeology,” Kim Kyung-mi, curator of the exhibition, told the Korea JoongAng Daily. “Lee has always been fascinated with the bodies of both humans and animals. He did extensive research on his own — even eating a whole chicken just to piece the bones back together to figure out the anatomy of skeletal system.”

″Ridicularis″ (2008) is based on Disney's Goofy. [BUSAN MUSEUM OF ART]

Lee wanted to explore the physicality of real animals as well, which influenced him to make devices that help to see the world from the point of view of non-humans, as in pieces like “Mirror Canopy” (2010) and “Fish Eye Gear” (2010).

The former is a wooden chair surrounded by dozens of small round convex mirrors. When sitting on it, it “shows the perspective of a dragonfly,” Kim said. The latter is an anti-contamination suit with magnifying lenses on each side of the head that has been “configured as the viewpoint of a fish.”

A scene from “Measure” (2014), a five-minute single-channel video showing Lee galloping like a horse in a device he made. [BUSAN MUSEUM OF ART]

His interest in transforming into an animal can also be seen in “Measure” (2014), a five-minute single-channel video showing him galloping around in a device that has adopted the physical structure of an actual horse. The sight itself seems ridiculous, yet Lee shows no change in facial expression and remains sincere, representing his determination to become a coherent whole.

In “The Objectuals” series, Lee shows off the mad scientist side of himself. Lee uses concave and convex lenses to refract the images of his own face like in the photograph “Altering Facial Features with H-WR” (2007). Wearing a transparent helmet, his eyes bulge and his grin appears wider than normal due to the convex lenses attached to it. In other photographs, Lee’s eyes have shrunk as he gazes into concave lenses.

“Altering Facial Features with H-WR” (2007) by Lee accentuates his eyes and wide smile with convex lenses. [BUSAN MUSEUM OF ART]

According to curator Kim, the photographs required the help of Lee’s friends to take the pictures because he had difficulty seeing due to the lenses.

Lee stands out as an artist for his use of the human body not just as a means to an end, but his utilization of it as a tool to express various elaborate themes.

For instance, historical views of the microcosm-macrocosm analogy believe that the human body and the universe have similarities in their structures, so Lee assembled materials such as papier-mâché and polyurethane foam in a mobile to portray the human body like a celestial map in “X Variation” (2021).

Sitting in “Mirror Canopy” (2010) creates the point of view of a dragonfly. [BUSAN MUSEUM OF ART]

He also rejects physiognomy, or the practice of assessing a person's character or personality from their outer appearance, by deconstructing parts of his own facial features and combining them into other portrait busts of different races and genders in 12 versions in his “Face Trace” series.

“In physiognomy, they say that our fates have already been decided just by how we look,” Kim said. “But Lee wanted to debunk that — we are capable of writing our own destiny as independent beings.”

“Highlighting Korean Contemporary Artist IV – Hyungkoo Lee” continues until Aug. 7. BMA is open every day except Mondays, from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. The exhibition is free to all.

BY SHIN MIN-HEE [shin.minhee@joongang.co.kr]