Adaptations and Threads

Mercury in Roman mythology is an agile god. He is the most mobile in the pantheon, freely crossing the border between this and the nether world. He is resourceful, making the most of his surroundings even when the situation is not so favorable. He is mentally and verbally adept at storytelling. And all this, he does with an edgy humor.

Essence and Structure

Mercury is the only element that retains a liquid form at room temperature. It does not wet or cling to a glass container like water. Mercury’s volume expands uniformly when the temperature changes, making it an apt gauger of the changes in the external environment. Because gold and silver dissolve in it, mercury was used to extract these precious metals in their pure forms from the ores.

“I want to be flexible. And I want to be able to change as my surroundings change. I’d rather be an adaptive artist than one with a steadfast philosophy.”

No artist would want to produce the same work over and over again.

But few are “flexible” enough to enjoy the dizzying and fearsome versatility of having no “philosophy.”

Alex Jongchul Lee, the Korean media artist, has never been hesitant to transform the look and feel of his works in the past decades.

He calls himself a media artist but his artistic medium ranges from traditional canvas paintings to digital imaging incorporating the latest AI technology. There is no immediately recognizable social or historical topic in Lee’s work because each piece incorporates a new reflection unvisited in the previous ones.

Responding to changes is harder than it sounds.

You would know if you have tried keeping up with news that now refreshes every few minutes.

Adapting to changes is even harder since it requires a lot more than a scrolling thumb. You must be physically diligent and mentally creative while being resilient in both.

Somehow, Lee shapeshifts in every work while not losing his cool.

He is agile.

I met Lee at his exhibition at Gallery Zeinxeno in Seoul on a breezy fall day. Dressed casually but smartly in a white t-shirt and cargo pants topped with a denim jacket, he was jovial and lightheartedly eloquent.

Lee unfolded the colorful anecdotes behind his art and life, his entrepreneurial drive, and the pleasure and difficulties of being a “flexible” one.

He had a rare command over the space that he occupied, filling it with his animated storytelling and unassuming yet charismatic devotion to his artistic direction which had a hint of mischievous ambition that was captivating to the conversing party.

Lee is a person with a strong emotive presence.

Which was why the temperature of his exhibition at Zeinxeno surprised me.

Unlike Lee’s warm conviviality, his installations under the title Chroma Threads felt carefully neutral.

Made up of three media panel and iron rod installations, Lee fully exploited the panels’ straight, modern lines that either met perpendicular to one another or crisscrossed, which were then placed in the three separate corners of the sparse gallery space to maximize the sense of three-dimensional depth.

The flat panels, featuring tactile surfaces either in vivid colors or black-and-white, streamed the images at a disinterested speed—as if you were watching the countless bytes of information being processed and projected in one immaculate flow.

“I tend to start [a work] from a structure or plausibility than from sensations. This could make a piece feel rather dry, but that’s how I am. That’s my nature.”

Mine each of Alex Jongchul Lee’s works, you will come across a binary.

The binary of three- and two-dimensional worlds, representational and abstract, “real” and virtual realms, and polychrome and monochrome.

But these binaries do not necessarily exist in isolated parallels.

Oftentimes they are juxtaposed, leaving little to no surveilling room around their border.

Sometimes they are overlapped and enfolded, rendering the seemingly solid border precarious.

But what did these panels mean?

The sensuously colored surfaces on the horizontal panels are pictures of the walls in the mostly rough neighborhoods in different parts of Europe that Lee captured during his photographic wanderings.

The black-and-white images on the vertical panels with likewise palpable, coarse surfaces were also serendipitous finds. The monotone marks and scars on the walls were the remnants of an anti-war demonstration in Melbourne surrounding the Land Forces Expo.

In itself, each sensuous image trapped under a smooth digital panel reminds you of a visual seduction in a swarm of online objects that vie for your attention.

But something else happens when these isolated images are threaded.

What was once a patch becomes a part of a quilt.

And sometimes, these threaded patches even tell a collective story.

A story of economically disadvantaged lives hidden behind dazzling colors.

A story of the hopes and actions for world peace, however somber and agonizing the damages in its process may be.

And it is through stories that we connect with other humans.

I remembered how seasoned Lee was in telling stories.

Also that he was skillful at telling many different stories.   

But what does this binary mean?   

Perhaps nothing in itself?

Or can its two-fold structure be its meaning?

Or still, are we simply asking the wrong question?

It would be easy to tell what kind of artist Lee is if he consistently told stories about something, whether it be genuine human connections in the digital era, the absorbing and unnerving media universe, or its depthless, and thus thrilling, possibilities.

But Lee’s oeuvre is so diverse to the extent of being amorphous.

His other creations, such as the work included in Baroque 2.0, look and feel entirely different from Chroma Threads.

In this acrylic painting series made of alluring and flowy black-ink flowers and flat, artificial color pixels, it is very difficult, if not impossible, to tease out any legible stories like you could (though with significant effort) in Chroma Threads.

There are flowers on canvas but Lee is not even talking about flowers.

They are simply a visual apparatus that caters to the viewers’ aesthetic pleasure, holding their attention to have them absorb the rest of the paintings that may be less than visually delightful.

Talk about resourcefulness.

Mercury can seamlessly fill whatever physical vessel that it is poured into. It is also an agent to extract pure gold and silver from their messy alloys.

Its curious chemical nature, both independent and responsive, makes it a perfect agent to reveal the shapes and natures of other objects.

What you do see, however, are visually contrasting elements, randomly chosen (it could have been cakes instead of flowers), either put side by side or stacked.

The grouped elements uncannily evoke that moment of encountering a sumptuous picture of delicate flower petals flickering past on your social media feed as you (doom)scroll.

Perhaps, we should not ask what Lee’s binary structure means.

Then, Lee is still telling a story.

Not a story about something, but a story as itself—its bones/structure, its mechanism, its impact on us.

And you can drape and dress bare-bones in myriad ways.

Mercury can travel between the opposite realms of the living and the dead. His nimble stories about their gulf and unexpected overlaps take a distinctive shape each time, depending on where he is, how he feels, and who he is talking to.

To his naïve listeners, his divergent stories can be both mesmerizing and disorienting.

Let’s ask what it does.

Lee has been telling a story with a structure.

There are spontaneous fragments spotted in real life.

Their sensory stirrings are then processed through the technical logic of the digital universe.

There arise clashing physical sensations.

One moment you feel the depth of space, its three-dimensional vitality embracing you, which flattens to a stoic two-dimension in the next.

And vice versa.

The switch happens fast and often to the point of vibrations, at times collapsing the gap between the two opposites.     

Upon this structure, Lee has been playing wildly with adaptations.

During his residency at the South Los Angeles Contemporary, Lee scavenged objects discarded around his studio and created contrasting canvas spaces by rubbing them on paper. Weaving in the unique condition of being an international artist in a foreign country, the story borne in Eureka, California murmured of working in an alien environment that prompted Lee to ponder the possibilities of being something other than “Korean.”

Lee’s structure draws out the nature of things around him.

Neatly nestled in whichever environment he finds himself in, Lee processes the alien objects through his simple yet capable system:

Lee found that he “can be anything.”

So he explored what the opposite of being a “Korean” would be.

In Lee’s space of stark monotone contrast, you feel tense oscillations:

between #FFFFFF and #000000, between the bare white (or no colors) in Korea and Eureka, between the foreign finds (E[e]ureka) and personal reinterpretations (Adaptations), between physical presence and absence.   

Trace that firm scaffolds underneath, threading together Lee’s decades of adaptations.

But is flexibility grounded in structure adaptations or reiterations?

Are these varied adaptations, in the end, the same old story?

Will Lee exhaust all creative possibilities, eventually?

the nature of empathy and human relationships in a virtual world, the nature of being a “foreign Asian artist,” …

Throughout the numerous artistic processes that Lee implemented so far, his structure has not wavered.

His binary system is dense yet strangely fluid. Its apparent metallic abstinence ironically makes it the most vibrant agent for creative applications.

If I could imagine what his next work would look like, I would say yes.

But I cannot.

What will come out next from his mercurial system?