Kang Seung Lee’s practice could be considered the artistic equivalent of alchemy. While all artists conjure ideas, feelings, and perceptions in works of art, Lee’s attempts at recreating historical photographs, artworks, and personal traces of predominantly queer artists’ lives involve cross-media experimentations based on his rethinking of both the matter and the spirit of the original source. Once combined with the artist’s conspicuous yet exactingly conceived and executed sense of “touch,” Lee’s interventions reveal themselves to be no less magical than the transformation of molten alloys into gold.
Born in Seoul and now based in Los Angeles, Lee has taken the life and artistic legacy of Hong Kong-born artist Tseng Kwong Chi (1950–90) as the primary component of a recent body of work, spanning the series Untitled (TKC) (2019–20) and others. Tseng, a self-described “inquisitive traveler, a witness of [his] time, and an ambiguous ambassador,” moved to New York in 1978 and mingled with the flourishing queer scene downtown, where he became quite close with Keith Haring, among others, and shared many of his peers’ tragic fate when he died from AIDS- related complications in 1990. Beyond his photographs of Haring and their circle, Tseng’s most well-known images belong to the playfully titled series East Meets West (1979–89). In these self-portraits, the artist wears a Zhongshan (or “Mao”) suit and reflective sunglasses as he poses with a culturally significant or natural heritage site in the “West.” Lee, for his series, takes these photographs and renders them in painstaking photorealistic detail in pencil, but with a twist: in almost all of the drawings based on East Meets West (and other photographs by Tseng), the subject has evaporated into thin air, rendered with gentle swirls of an unidentifiable, ether-like matter.
There are, however, significant exceptions to the figure’s dematerialization in Lee’s drawings. If Tseng is holding a shutter-release cable or has an ID picture attached to his left breast pocket in the original photograph, Lee leaves these elements behind. As both ostensibly relate to the practice of image-making, the objects’ presence further marks Tseng’s vanished body as absent. The exacerbation of the artist’s disappearance from his own pictures is in keeping with the spirit of East Meets West: just as the global tourism industry has reduced major cities to a standardized tour of iconic landmarks (the Eiffel Tower and Notre Dame in Paris, the Colosseum in Rome, for example) and mass-produced souvenirs, so the Chinese artist effaced himself behind the cliché persona of “a follower of Mao” in the xenophobic, anti- communist “Western” mind—a relevant gesture today, given the resurgence of anti-Asian racism especially in the United States and Europe.
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