Woongcheol Lee’s recent bodies of work explore personal connections to his father, while building off the artist’s longstanding interests in media, memory, and materiality. Through different media, Lee thoughtfully draws out connections between the past rooted in his familial experience to the present condition. The success of Lee’s work is built on thoughtful attention to the ways in which media define possibilities of perception, and in turn, the ways in which perception is rooted in the specifics of the material world.

   The two projects, <Tangle of Time> and <Perspectives> share motifs and overlap in their explorations of history, memory, and environment, but do so through different means. Tangle of Time is a series of photographic works with hand-drawn elements, while Perspectives is a video work with sound. Through each of these projects, Lee pushes media towards its own limitations to shape the artistic encounter in ways that leave lasting impressions. However, despite these differences, Lee’s projects clearly constitute a united oeuvre in which the individual parts iterate and expand upon core themes in both divergent and complementary ways.

   Both <Tangle of Time> and <Perspectives> contented with the legacy of Lee’s father, who worked construction jobs in the middle east during the late 1970s and 1980s during a period in which the South Korean government forged strong economic ties in the region in the interest of mutual expansion and growth of capital within markets domineered by the energy sector. By providing in-demand laborers to help construct numerous projects, Korean workers were able earn money to support families back home and serve the nation’s greater goals of economic development. Lee’s father was one of these workers, and his accounts of his time abroad—particularly in Saudi Arabia—serve as the basis for Lee’s artistic inquires in both projects.

In both projects, the context of Lee’s father’s experiences is not foregrounded, but it is certainly constitutive of the core themes that Lee explores, and it repeatedly reveals itself to the viewer through close looking and contemplation. These projects are not simply a reenactment of Lee’s father’s experiences or a straightforward critique of historical events, but rather a nuanced undertaking that carefully connects separate threads between past and present, and between individual experience and societal ramifications.

   To address his father’s experiences, Lee must encounter his experiences through a familial archive. Unlike institutional archives and official narratives, these sources of family memory are more ephemeral and offer less conclusive accounts of the past. For Lee the archival basis of these works includes his Father’s journals, pictures, oral accounts, and material souvenirs acquired during the period. Among these souvenirs are a black rock, that Lee invests heavily with metaphoric potentials and a clothes iron. Western appliances were often purchased and brought back by Korean works.

   Lee’s father’s accounts offer a source of material that foregrounds specific subjectivity with vivid, albeit often selective detail, where memory and its accessibility becomes one pole of Lee’s work. The souvenirs –the black rock and the iron—form the other pole of Lee’s work, offering discrete ready-made objects that are simultaneously inscribed with their own meanings and open to further situation as symbols, as metaphors, and motifs in Lee’s art. Lee plays out a separate dichotomy between these two objects. The black rock becomes a source of mythology upon which Lee explores primordial connections to earth, energy, formation, and deep geological time. The iron remains rooted both in the individual and domestic spaces, but it also becomes a stand-in for trade and the dominance of capitalist markets and commodities. In Lee’s works both of these objects become powerful stand-ins for the phenomena that shape our world from the top down and the bottom up.

   Lee’s <Tangle of Time> series is comprised of black and white pigment prints—printed at relatively large scale—with charcoal drawing applied directly to the surface of the prints. The works are presented unframed, attached directly to the wall. This exposure of the sheets and surfaces of the image resists the traditional presentation of photographs as art objects encased in frames and glazing. To show the works in this way encourages a more intimate sense of viewership and direct connection to the materials of the work, but it also offers a sense of vulnerability. The fragility and ephemerality of paper is apparent, and the fixity of the charcoal drawing seems tenuous—a swipe of the hand could easily smudge or alter Lee’s marks on the surface.

   The choice of presentation effectively brings material representation to the processes of memory, especially those based in intergenerational story telling and recollection. Memories are not discrete, immutable object, but are inherently fleeting and fixed only by iterative retelling and remembrance. The charcoal itself signifies a number of relationships between the content of the underlying images and the processes of memory that Lee seeks to interrogate. Charcoal is one of the oldest drawing mediums drawn out of the earth, and its use not only as an artistic medium but as an important source of fuel in the development of human activity creates a through line to the experiences of Lee’s father working in service of the oil industry.

The effect of the charcoal over the surface of each photographic image is unique and contradictory. Each photograph is boldly framed with the charcoal and then carefully applied in varying strokes across the surface of the image. The width, pressure, and directionality of Lee’s stroke varies on each image, but in each case the artist’s hand is clearly visible. The charcoal simultaneously adds a descriptive texture to each image, while generally serving to obscure the image.  This contradiction further draws out Lee’s materialization of the processes of memory in which continual re-inscription serve to both keep the memory alive and obscure the original.

   The photographs themselves depict different scenes of the Middle East. They draw on construction sties with depictions of scaffolding, trucks, and rubble, but also include some images that look outward—an airplane flying overhead and donkey with its foal. Scrutiny of the photographs affords some details—text, landscape, people—but the overall context is oblique. Lee seems to intentionally blend locations and temporalities. Cleary, given the scale and the charcoal intervention, these are not reprints of Lee’s father’s own photographs, but perhaps some of them are build on his own images. Or maybe Lee has sourced contemporary photographs to evoke the experiences of his father. The images may simply be of the present, emphasizing the continual developments and influx of construction in the region that have continued since the 1980s. Regardless of the precise origin of these images, Lee draws attentions to their abilities to evoke sentiment more than a specific time or place.

   Through <Tangle in Time> Lee fleshes out metaphor for memory and filial encounter with events that exert great influence in his own life, but remain only accessibly indirectly. Lee expertly blends the subjectivities of man and machine to create intermedial works that reward close viewing without being overly determined or sentimental. While the works is rooted in the specificity of his father’s experiences, Lee creates works that resonate and open up the interpretive field to additional associations.

<Perspectives> offers a very different thread of Lee’s work. The single-channel video piece presents ethereal imagery and narration that again plays on tensions between the specific and the universal in relation to Lee’s father’s experience. The computer-generated imagery draws on both representations of places as well as isolated motifs. The scale shifts in and out throughout the course of the video, offering some seemingly human perspectives, before zooming in onto individual particles, and zooming out to depict grand bodies in space. In this regard, Lee makes use of ray and particular effects that enable this collapsing of scales to emphasize interconnectedness.

   The imagery of the video is accompanied by soundtrack that punctuates the fluctuations in visual field. Furthermore, the sound fades in-and-out to sync to voiceover narration that builds off of Lee’s father’s experiences in the Middle. The narration focuses primarily on descriptive experiences of physical and emotional stimulus—heat—but also on the material conditions that define a place—sand. The dizzying perspectives of the piece are disorienting, but effect in succinctly connecting the cosmic to the microcosmic and the grand arch of mythological time to the experiences of an individual.

   <Perspectives> and <Tangles of Time> work in sync to explore related phenomena. Through these recent works, Lee demonstrates his mastery of multiple media, and more impressively, his thoughtfulness for using the qualities of specific material to provoke and push the connections between physical object and conceptual framework. Lee’s thinking is far-reaching, and he seems intent at every point to follow through lines in all directions, without being limited any individual factors. He draws out dichotomies that than reduce phenomena to specific points, flesh out discursive formations with open-ended possibilities.