young-il Wee Text

I am always interested in the massive amounts of information being circulated, the thoughts that people have, and the social and cultural phenomena taking place around me. My work involves reconstructing or reprocessing these things and presenting Them through a variety of mediums and methods.

The work that I have conducted so far largely consists of 'multilayered explorations of desire' and 'postulation. As part of my 'multilayered explorations of desire,' I have examined 'otherness,' a topic of continued interest in art history since modernism from various angles, ranging from the general issues of fine art to the contemporary social and cultural phenomena within Korea, in a series named 'A League of Their Own.' This series is made up of three parts.

'A League of Their Own Ⅰ' deals with the lack of communication within contemporary fine art between the creators and consumers of art, identifying its reason as the authoritative attitude on the part of the artists and indifference on the part the viewers. In 'A League of Their Own Ⅱ,' American superhero characters and famous Major League Baseball players are taken as examples of American heroism with its imperialism and fetishism persistently drilled into the 'others' through various mediums. This part of the series looks into the reasons behind the American worshipping of heroes, exposing it as a mere illusion and caricaturizing it, thereby disrupting the powers of such heroes. In 'A League of Their Own Ⅲ,' I investigate signs throughout Korean society in the 2000s of the dreams and desires of the social and cultural 'others' as 'subjects,' going back and forth between virtual and real spaces.

My use of the concept of 'postulation' can be found in both the 'Planet wee012 All-Star' series and the 'Aleatorik Painting Project.' Planet wee012 All-Star is a virtual planet created based on my own arbitrary postulation. Here, I divide the objects of human desire into seven categories - appetite, sex, longevity, power, convenience, speed and Guinness - while structuring non-materialistic desires through various characters, systems and situations, to build a narrative that mocks people's excessive desires. This reflects my idea that to create art is to show an arbitrarily postulated world with existing things as points of reference.

The Aleatorik Painting Project that I've recently been working on concerns the formal aspect of art and the uncertainty of the present age. I am currently in the process of creating 'paintings of postulation' (aleatorik paintings: paintings done by following the number of cases when throwing dice). Through the act of probing fate within a world which has been postulated (a manual selected and repostulated based on the history of fine art) and complying with the result, I wish to show that people belong to a world (system) already set up by someone, and are leading unpredictable and uncertain lives, discordant with their individual thoughts, choices or intentions. I am also trying to avoid tautology, coming from the innate limitations of art which is inclined toward self-analogy, or the common approach of relying on simple schematism and index to understand artists and their work because it is convenient and pragmatic. Since such tendencies are more frequently found in paintings compared to sculptures and installations, I am limiting my work to paintings. Referencing the styles of others, I am trying to erase my own unique colors and to challenge, or more fundamentally, shake up the customary categorizations of artists and schools in fine art.

by wee young-il