Maelee-Infinite Space, Dr. Thalia Vrachopoulos

Maelee Lee: Infinite Space

Dr. Thalia Vrachopoulos
Thalia Vrachopoulos  is Ph.D. International Art Critic, Curator,
and  Professor in Jonh Jay College of Criminal Justice City University of New York.

Although Maelee Lee’s works for the Chelsea Art Museum show take on three morphologies, they all examine conceptions of space. Space takes on different forms depending on the area of cognition; mathematics, psychology, mechanics, philosophy, and personal. It is demonstrated in Lee’s photographs as atmosphere, negative space, or artistic or infinite space. Lee’s works are photographic conceptual installations that consider their in-situ environment or the gallery space for which they were made. As such they are minimalist works with photography as medium but whose primary concern is the concept.

The first series entitled Absolute Space, 2011 tackles the issues of time and space, being and existence. Visible substance takes on the form of a woman’s high heel pump, a mountain or the sea. The high heel pump is the symbol of feminine manifestation. Lee’s sculptural pieces appear as white boxy forms that are multiplied through actual planes in space as well as through mirrors with the high heel shoe that adds another dimension to their reading. Although Isaac Newton’s Principia (1687) refers to absolute space as a background space for mathematics, Lee’s conception is more like the infinite space of the N-dimension. In optics photography it is not only the axial or direct but also the oblique rays that must be brought into focus. This is analogous to Lee’s multiplication of planes through the use of mirrors and/or framing devices.

Lee’s 2010 Ocean series photographs are also about space, one that is solid and alternately void; the observed and the invisible. The solid/void relationship holds great significance for Korean culture, and is associated with the yin and yang or feminine and masculine principles of Taoism. In this context also the void is full and empty simultaneously. Lee has physically sliced the photographs of the ocean taken during different weather conditions so that she exhibits the piece in horizontal slats read as solid and void that like Carl Andre’s minimalist sculptures are meant to sit partially on the floor. Andre is known as one of the artists who established Minimalism, an art style that reduces the artistic components to their purest level of precision, austerity and tranquility.

Lee’s Poetics of Space, 2011 photographic series depicts land-seascapes overlain with textual references. To Lee substance is represented by ocean/landscape while the text contains worlds of a different time and space. So that, when Lee alludes to Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, it is understood that she means to include this author’s own time and place. In the essay Woolf postulates for women’s right to have a space of their own in which to be creative and the means with which to support themselves. Lee also employs text from Heo Nanseiolheon who wrote poetry in Korea during the 16th Century Chosun Dynasty. In Kyunwonka Heo petitions female acknowledgment and writes about the unrequited longing of women for recognition. Woolf’s writings like Heo’s advocate women’s independence and as such reach outside their own time and space to be relevant even to our own era. Perhaps these two heroines didn’t live to see their independence during their own era but by inscribing the landscape with their texts Lee is claiming this space for them.  

Taken as a whole, the exhibition can be seen as the juxtaposition of Euclidean geometry (parallel rectilinear lines) and non-Euclidean (spherical and hyperbolic geometry) space. While the severe grid-like forms of the Absolute Space works are Euclidean, the softer round lines of the high heel pumps are non-Euclidean. Consequently Lee examines both ancient Greek geometry, Asian philosophy and modern philosophical precepts of space as they pertain to woman-ist thought.