The work explores the increasing gap between mortality and existence as well as the disparity between the natural world and mass-produced objects. As time lapses in the video, crawling larvae begin to feast on the bird’s tiny corpse while the empty packages remain perfectly intact. The rotating disk seems to symbolize the endless cycle of human consumption, which continues despite life and death. The title of the video is also an ironic reference to the Latin phrase “By the grace of God,” that signals the divine sovereignty claimed by European monarchies (and is similar to the phrase found on the reverse side of British and Canadian coins). In Lee’s video it also refers to the idolatry that comes from a society worshipping heavily marketed objects such as exotic perfumes and cigarettes. This uncanny, symbolic use of rotating objects—evoking Buddhist-inflected notions of repetition and the cycle of life—recalls Lee’s metaphor of humans as items on a merry-go-round, and his own sense of anxiety and distress when confronted by social conformity. 

If Dei Gratia was a poignant reflection of the artist’s discomfort with the vicious cycle of consumerism, his subsequent works were deliberate attempts to change his own habits and mindset as an individual constantly exposed to such materialism. Around the same time as the creation of Dei Gratia, Lee began a series of works, “Life Is Widely Spreading Blood-Red Ripples” (2008–09), that featured food items for the first time, investigating his hypothesis that consumerism was an inevitable outcome of human desires for convenience. The first work in this series, Kiss Lonely Goodbye, Chicken Baseball (2008), is an installation of seemingly ordinary-looking baseballs, some of which are placed inside a yellow supermarket basket and others scattered across a patch of artificial grass. Upon closer inspection, it becomes clear that the baseballs were in fact sculpted from an unusual and unlikely material: ground chicken.

When first shown in Korea, Lee’s strange objects turned heads. With this work, the artist aimed to disrupt the banality that pervades quotidian processes and rituals. The added optical illusion was a twist on mainstream associations between food and sports, serving as an eerie critique on the absurdity of Korea’s mass consumption habits and how they are deeply linked to American culture—Korean fried chicken, canned meat like Spam and baseball all being legacies of the US military’s occupation of the Korean peninsula in the 1950s. As Lee explained to me, “Baseball is most popular in developing countries that built strong economic and diplomatic ties with the United States. South Korea’s obsession with baseball is no exception—its fan base grew concurrently with exponential capitalist development during the postwar period, under a heavy American influence.” In this light, the chicken “baseballs” seem to physically embody Lee’s musings on the everyday consumption of convenience goods and sports as something inextricably bound to neoliberalist attitudes.

While Lee has criticized the prevalence of global capitalism in Korean society, he is also keenly skeptical of more local politics. Another work in the “Life Is Widely Spreading Blood-Red Ripples” series, titled The Household Items (2009) utilized ground beef to create lifelike replicas of utilitarian items commonplace in South Korea, such as a stick of lumber, a broom, a plunger and a spade. Lee said he specifically chose objects with a highly discernible use. For example, the stick is normally used in Korean high schools and the military for corporal punishment, while the luminescent green broom is used to clean streets and other public spaces. When Lee re-creates these objects in beef, thereby rendering them useless, the object’s symbolic value and status in society—whether representing authority, like the stick, or subservience, like the broom—are brought into question. For his solo exhibition at Seoul’s Total Museum of Contemporary Art in 2009, Lee hung these sculptures on a storage rack, while others leaned against the wall in simulacrum of a domestic situation. Upon closer inspection, the strangely synthetic texture of the animal meat—coated with thick acrylic paint and varnish—revealed the deceptive nature of Lee’s objects. This visual spin underlined the perceived and prescribed values we place on objects.

Lee’s view of Korean society is unapologetically critical and candid. After making the “Life Is Widely Spreading Blood-Red Ripples” series, he expounded on his rejection of conformist pressures by physically—sometimes violently—altering objects in the series “Forlorn Standard” (2010). One of the central aims of this body of work was to explore how objects could reflect the psychological strain of complying with ideological conventions. He took various household items and materials and put them through drastic modifications. Slabs of brick and stone, tiles, wheels of trolleys, hammers and other mundane objects, were cut, ground and polished to create a reflective surface. While it is harder to change the uneven clay-based exterior of a brick into a mirror, Lee explained to me that other objects, such as a solid-iron gym weight, transform relatively easily into a mirror due to their metallic composition. This brutal transformation forced very different objects to become more similar in both appearance and utilitarian value. The uniformity created a sense of order, restraint and control. At the same time, subtle variations in color, material and form convey the extent to which standardization also creates differentiation among individuals, showing the impossibility of adopting a singular standard.

Continuing his focus on dogmatic social obedience and processes of coercive transformation in How to Become Us (2011), Lee collected used and discarded objects from the streets—including mannequins, plastic water bottles, stools, trays, shovels and a refrigerator—and exhibited them at Seoul alternative space Art Space Pool in 2011. He split, cut and combined these materials into 60 assemblages, which he placed on individual industrial scales showing that each had achieved the exact mean weight—5.06 kilograms—of the collective mass. Appearing almost like a window display, the work evoked the regulated structures of a supermarket. Its title, How to Become Us, also carried the ironic implication that overarching collective systems determine our individual identities.

Lee pushes back against a reality that he sees as dictated by capitalist ideology. He mentioned in our conversation that he often
feels blindsided by the intentionally complex rules of capitalism, which he thinks are irrational and unpredictable, and a catalyst for volatile social conditions. In one of Lee’s most iconic sculptures, The Possibility of Impossible Things (2012), he explores our ability to determine and predict future value of objects in an era of capitalism and mass production. The sculpture features a beam scale with a stone brick hung on one side, and a large rubbish bag with undisclosed contents on the other. The work refers to the financial collapse Lee witnessed in 1997, when a severe depletion of the government’s foreign-exchange reserves had necessitated a bailout by the International Monetary Fund. Although Lee doesn’t explicitly make mention of this event, the work suggests a cynical attitude to the notion of equating monetary and material values. This apprehension—and confusion about what equals what—is represented in a delicate balance between certainty and uncertainty. When Lee showed The Possibility of Impossible Things at the Daegu Art Museum in 2012, the vertical pole of the scale was masked with a green cloth, on top of which he perched a taxidermy pheasant. While the scarf reflects the obfuscation of stock market exchange by masking the axis of balance, the bird, according to Lee, is a metaphor for our inability to operate outside of consumerist society. Lee said of the pheasant: “Its wild ancestors were apparently much stronger . . . and intellectually superior, but [the birds] degenerated due to inactivity.”

Up until 2013, the scope of Lee’s explorations of consumption had been expressed through his abstract assemblages and sculptures. While former works critiqued consumerist culture, the “Made In” series delved deeper into these interests by looking at the geopolitical implications of capitalism in modern urban life. Each of the 12 multichannel videos in the series provided insightful commentary on the artist’s experience of entering an unfamiliar environment and laboriously creating a single commodity by himself. For example, in the Cambodia segment, the video’s Korean and English subtitles provided personal and interpretive notes on the political history of Cambodia and its rice production, from the time of its liberation from French colonial rule in the 1950s to the mid-1970s, when the Khmer Rouge came to power under the ruthless Pol Pot. We see Lee first traveling to the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum and later navigating his way to the rice farm on the outskirts of Phnom Penh, where he meets and interviews a farmer who was a former Khmer Rouge soldier. It is this farmer who gives Lee grains of rice to plant a crop that will become one of the final products in the work. In this way, Lee connects the still-vital act of cultivating rice to a traumatic and turbulent period, where more than two million people were either brutally murdered or perished due to labor exhaustion or starvation as a result of Pol Pot’s attempts to build a classless, agrarian society.

When I met Lee at a former steel warehouse turned studio in the Mullae-dong area of Seoul in January, he told me he was juggling a number of projects. The next day, he was due to travel to Malaysia to film the final segment of “Made In” that will premiere at the Venice Biennale. Accompanying this will be Proper Time and Mr. K and the Collection of Korean History (2017), a large-scale project that narrates the life of the semi-fictitious “Mr. K,” loosely based on a man called Kim Kimoon who lived from the 1930s to 2011. The installation will piece together an archive of 14,000 photographs with a collection of various artifacts to offer unreliable narratives of Korea’s tumultuous modern history. Additionally, the images will be partially obscured and only visible through peepholes, which further questions “the legitimacy of seamless and coherent construction of universal history,” and challenges viewers to explore relative truths amid a stifling social atmosphere of material excess and information overload.

The works on view at Lee Wan’s latest exhibition in February, at 313 Art Project in Seoul, further solidified the artist’s unwavering tenacity in addressing social issues. The series “A Diligent Attitude Toward a Meaningless Thing” (2017) consists of abstract paintings marked with enigmatic calligraphic scrawls, co-produced by Lee and eight migrant workers hired through a local employment agency. The resulting lyrical and minimalist epiphanies on the gallery walls were visually captivating, but they left viewers with a moral dilemma that is echoed throughout all of his works. Lee seemed to be asking: What determines the true value of art? Is it the observer? Or is it the sacrifices made in the name of labor and capitalism? Political and transformative, Lee Wan’s rebellious expressions encourage us to consider the world beyond its material, consumerist terms.

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