Female Identity and Timeless Space in Maelee Lee’s Work, Maurizio Bort…

Female Identity and Timeless Space in Maelee Lee’s Work.

Maurizio Bortolotti
(Curator of Zuecca Project Space International Program)

The starting point of Le Mae Lee’s work is the use of architectural minimalistic form, but she doesn’t take inspiration from the American art movement. Her work is much more oriented toward a representation of a feeling of life. As she says: “I try to express the feeling of existence through
three-dimension space”.
 

The use of minimalistic form was developed in her work as a space-time representation, in which time and space blurred into each other. In her painting “Time’s Being Space”, 2001, the artist places a square representing an essential image of space inside another space. This space inside hints at a development of time dimensionality. In another later work, “Drawing for Earth”, 2003, the artist goes directly into three-dimensions. Here the two-dimensional image is developed in real space making a cubic shape installed in a room.
 

In “Space-Zero” (2007), the artist employs a series of stainless steel panels that symbolize elements like sky, ground, and sea, blurred together. This is an essential form of representation in which space and time are fused in a contemplative feeling of life and become one. Lee Mae Lee’s search for a symbolic representation of space-time refers to her anthropological background of culture in her homeland, Korea.
 

However, the turning point in her work is the introduction of the image of the female shoe. Starting from this moment, it becomes the fundamental icon of her work. The use of this image allows Lee to enter the everyday life space. Inside all her work there is a subtle process of symbolization, even the image of shoe is taken as it and not simply as a quotation from reality.
The artist believes the shoe is her own Alter Ego. She takes it as a starting point to explore a female public identity, transforming it into a personal obsessive feminine image.
The shoe’s red color and high heel offers an image of today life style, a social female ideal. It is a idol of modernity as symbol of desire and consumerism in a society devoted to consume; but it is also a representation of fugacity of life summed up in an icon. It is an female image, connected to a traditional idea of female role assigned by fashion and spread by media in society.  So, Lee uses this image as representation of a social relationship, as it  relates to the roots of Modern Korean society. 
 

Nevertheless, her concern about space/time takes the image of the shoe far beyond of a female icon. This object, the shoe, becomes a representation of an existential condition, in which its link to desire and seduction turns to be a representation of feeling of life. As it is a representation of social status, the shoe becomes a medium of communication.

This is evident in “Communication and Desire”, 2004; or in the series “Communication, Communication; Communication” realized in different versions from 2007 to 2008. This minimalist structure together with the image of the shoe implies the idea of deconstruction in which minimalism becomes a representation of sentiment of life. In these works the writing “communication”, obsessively repeated, is an essential idea of  contemporary  society. It is a kind of spectacle.
This development in her work appears in her 2007 series “Time’s Being Space”. In these installations the grid of minimalist architecture overlaps the everyday presentation of a shoe in a bookcase. The universalism of minimalist sculpture enters the precarious instant of everyday life as represented by the shelf/bookcase.

In works, such as “Portraits of Shoe” (2009); “The Glimpses of Life” (2012); “Into the Great Silence” (2013) she articulates the idol of shoe in many different aspects, but in all of them there is the idea to explore a social idol in search of a representation of contemporary society. The iconic structure of “Into the Great Silence”, made the shoes in recycled paper, looks like a shrine and a symbolic image of our society in its pyramidal structure.

The image of shoe becomes a medium with different levels of meaning. It represents the female condition in contemporary society but also a precarious feeling of existence. The object becomes the protagonist of Lee’s work with a strong symbolic dimension granted by the artist.
In her work shoe is not simply an object to show, it becomes a witness to present life: the “Simulacre" of the artist watching the world. An installation from 2011, a shoe three meters high, was placed in front of a container covered by graffiti. Or in “Portrait of Shoe”, 2013, when it is installed outdoor, nearby a structure with mirrored surface reflecting the city in front of it.

This is more explicit in the series “Absolute Space”, 2011, where a shoe is photographed in front of framed fragment of a book. This is a clear representation of an idea of witness. The artist’s object of desire observes fragments of art and literature told in a book, on which some lines are isolated. The absolute space here is that of memory and time. The work, even due to the process of photographing it becomes  an abstract space on which a narrative time is told. In some of the works from this series the shoe enters this space and becomes gold, the space of memory.

What Lee does in her compositions is not to build a new  iconography. On the contrary, she is exploring an “everyday mythology” in which to criticize Korean traditional society by focusing on female identity as conventionally received within it. The shoe is the mark of her work as an artist dealing with social criticism. 

In her recent works from 2014, Lee has realized a series of site specific installations in historical sites in Tuscany and Korea. Here the shoes change from a gigantic industrial product painted in red to a group of smaller recycled paper. As she has written: “The image of shoes in my early work presents my alter ego, the images of shoes in the recent installation present anonymous people.”

In these works she arranges a series of shoes in patterns interacting with ancien architecture and historical locations in Tuscany, revealing again her strong interest in architecture. She covers the ground of a courtyard of shoes following a precise pattern of concentric circles, till the base of an old well. another installation is to arrange shoes in subsequent rows above the steps of a church in San Giminiano. Her work suggests a confrontation with religion. In South Korea the artist makes an installation inside a sacred site, establishing a dialogue between a temple, with the symbol of Yin-Yang painted on the door, with her shoes organized in geometrical patterns. In other installations she distributes her shoes in different spots inside the sacred area. The shoes are organized following patterns to which she gave an harmonic organization. The “absolute space” is not anymore the space of memory, but that of spirituality, the Italian church and the Korean temple.
The shoes in recycled paper represent the people. The confrontation with religion and the social relations puts her again at the center overf controservy. What she seems to develop here is a research about the inner values of a community, looking for a more authentic and pure ones.