When contemplating “sculpture,” we always customarily assume that there is no empty space existant within. Even the sculpture has been created from a mold and is hollow inside, or if there is a cavity or opening, we still believe that the visible part of the physical sculpture is a “solid” object. (This is a prime example of the difference between large scale sculptures and buildings). This fundamental assumption consistently makes art critics define sculpture as a creation that takes up a tangible amount of physical space. We further make assumptions about the strength of a sculpture’s aesthetics, and assume that the strength originates from the perception of space given by the material that constitutes a sculpture’s 3D surface gives (because of the assumption that there is nothing inside). Yet even though a sculpture can bring about a perception of reality (fait), maybe it really is nothing more than a three-dimensional surface. If so, how should we conceptualize the sculpture’s inner space? Or how can we describe the feelings of physical body, volume, force, or intensity invoked by the sculpture? If there is no way to describe this kind of power and intensity, is it possible to really delve into the sculpture’s true aesthetic experience through mere description or analysis? Further, when we identify the sculpture’s physical appearance as a solid body, isn’t it already assumed that the sculpture has a potential cohesive force? How should we consider and analyze once we realize that although a part of our perceptions exists in reality, but that they also do not exist in the surface of the sculpture nor within the physical body of the sculpture itself, but can only use ‘potential power’ as an analytical support for our aesthetic judgments? Finally, what role does all this play in LEE Kuang-Yu’s aesthetic process?

Review: LEE Kuang-Yu’s Sculpture—Body

Experienced Taiwanese sculptor LEE Kuang-Yu is certainly no stranger to discussions on the potential power of a sculpture’s inner space. Even in the realist figures characteristic of his early years, one can already see the power and intensity conveyed through the various postures of his figures. By his 1980s creations, like Fountain of Life(fig.1) and A Hand It Seems(fig.2), Lee had undergone a dramatic change in aesthetic. These creations combined a continuation of the many aesthetic languages of Western sculpture history with an integration of the creative syntax of Eastern “statues.” In other words, this process of evolution is LEE Kuang-Yu’s creative exploration of life’s essence. Simultaneously, it is a conceptually specific attempt to integrate Eastern and Western styles. This confluence is undoubtedly based on the artist’s own life experiences and enthusiasm for exploring the nature of life. Yet this endless attention to life and physical body gives the very act of creation its own unique life of “Sculpture—Body”: by shaping a variety of inanimate materials into a form radically different from real life and transforming them into a kind of monument, their utterly static forms still undergo something akin to a distinctive growth process into sculpture. Before his 90s creations, LEE Kuang-Yu had already captured, mastered, deformed, and dismantled the possible role of aesthetics on every kind of physical body (both human and animal) to the limit. Therefore, in his own aesthetic evolution, he inevitably had to touch on subjects aside from the body.

Around the beginning of the 90s, LEE Kuang-Yu began playing with the dialectical relationship between “body” and “space.” He started frequently using a “scenic/window” kind of approach on the bodies of his sculptures to develop another open space. Sometimes he would place a smaller sculpture inside the interior of a bigger sculpture. (In other words, in the realistic world of a sculptural body, he created an additional world and an extra sculptural body). Through this, the sculptures became more than just closed physical figures. Instead, they became aesthetic pieces based on the concept of space with interrelated, lifelike qualities: inner-outer, virtual-real, and substantive-intangible. These sculptural figures evolved to the extent that even the “outer shape” and “hole” took on a necessary co-dependency. Lee’s late 1990s sculpture Opening(fig.3) depicts a palm with a square opening inside, with figures inside the opening. This appears to completely distort the physical shape of the palm. In addition, the piece Facing the Wind(fig.4), is a huge Buddhist palm with an opening on the left-hand side, where the opening has a similarly necessary relationship with other parts of the palm. Here the relationship has been reversed to become the foundations to the entire sculpture.

Over several decades, Lee has played around repeatedly with many themes in his physical sculptures: inner/outer, virtual/real, and penetrable/non-penetrable. Through this series of sculptures, his ruminations on the aesthetic labyrinth of spatial relations have been completely turned on their heads and thoroughly exhausted. Now in LEE Kuang-Yu’s new 2013 series of sculptures, the relationships between entity and void, body and power have been taken to a new aesthetic level once again. This series dramatically enforce the confrontational relationship of entity and void, while expanding the usage of “solid” and “hollow” in a completely new sculptural form. As expected, the change in style is closely related with the artist’s changing attention to aesthetics. The primary difference might be in the turn away from “physical body” to “bodily force.”

From the Physical Body to Bodily Force
We must strictly distinguish between force and motion. Force is not a movement, but rather the perceived prerequisite that occurs in order to promote movement. In art, the “reproduction of movements” is not difficult (whether it is painting, sculpture, photography, or video), but the “reproduction of force” is an entirely different matter. Because we can only generate perceptions through the reciprocal movements of substances and our own flesh, we thereby learn inversely that forces exist. If it were not for matter and the state of motion, force would only be virtual, never real. And because force does not have any perceivable material form, matter that attempt “reproduction of force” are utterly different from the existing reality in their secondary copy. In other words, the premise of the “reproduction of force” is that there exists a formless potential within the realistic material of the flesh, which inevitably creates a kind of presence and expression (présentation) rather than reproduction. The French philosopher Gilles Deleuze raised this question when discussing Francis Bacon’s paintings—how should the painter surpass movement to confront forces? By painting and drawing them out (peindre les forces)? Pressure, inertia, gravity, attraction, gravitation, and germinating capacity are especially important as these encompass everyday life. How can the painter support all the varieties of fundamental forces that happen in this world?

Because force is “not visible/perceivable,” reproducing motion to demonstrate force is certainly one way forwards. But then how can a static painting or sculpture demonstrate such forces? Bacon came up with a series of performances arranged in the middle of a pool, then subjected to the effect of various forces. They were twisted, distorted, and jerked into hysterical-looking bodies. But LEE Kuang-Yu focuses on esoteric and Qigong practices. His conceptions of the relationships between force and the body are therefore unlike the established practices of Bacon’s paintings, and rather extend to every type of posture and material. Since force cannot be seen and is of a non-material nature, the artist can only express force through visible materials and shapes, which can react to and bear force—based on this, the sculpture reflects the existing forces and the process and traces of motion. In this vein, the two bodies generate a moment of impact in his new piece Flyin(fig.5), demonstrating the force of impact. Skein of Heaven(fig.6) has been squashed and excessively stretched so that all filaments of the body demonstrate crimping force. In Woman(fig.7), the figure’s hands are twisted and the chest cavity is deeply sunk in through the force of reduction. In The Carefree Drunkard(fig.8), the figure’s body has completely been flipped inside-out into a petal-shape through an explosion of momentum and the force of stretching. Perhaps the most striking relationship of the forces is that the sculptures all demonstrate that all varieties of metals, when subjected to extreme pressure, will concave curve, bend, and be impacted, reflecting the multiple forces encountered in a static yet confrontational manner.

In other words, even though Lee’s past sculptural forms are also able to reflect these forces (body posture tensed or relaxed), the creations he exhibited in 2013 are conceptualized completely different from former works. These creations extensively use iron pieces, wire, and other materials in their assembly. In most sculptures, the framework is always the primary decider of the volume of the sculptural body, and an equal volume of soft material is then added. But for Lee this is not the case. Instead, Lee directly manipulates both the framework and surface of the sculpture to complete the sculptural body as a whole. In other words, his creative method has become “addition sculpture,” where works are made from many assembled components. Because the creations start directly from the surface instead of through a pre-determined body and framework, they always maintain a characteristic “hollowness” at the core, both during the creative process and after the works are finished. The creations are no longer a visible “physical body,” but rather a “physical body” coated with potential force and the configuration of “Force—Body” (crops-forces). In fact, Lee’s creations from the 1990s had already started to subtly depict this hollow expression of force. In this series the entity and cavity were already interwoven into the sculptures, not only in the bronze model’s material parts, but also in the emptiness of the air flow and landscape shape. Even though they are beyond the sculptures’ entities, they absolutely must be regarded as part of the whole work. In other words, Lee’s creations must consist of the dualism of the virtual and realistic to provide joint support, rather than either one or the other. From this angle, perhaps we can consider how Lee’s 2013 creations have taken a turn towards a greater emphasis on “virtual” aesthetics. Even though importance is placed on virtual over realistic, there is still a definite and concrete “body” at the core of Lee’s creations (although this body is not a material, visible body). With “addition sculptures” there is still by default an established body/mass. However, this body cannot be considered and preset through the material mass; instead, one can only turn towards the surface layers and surface construction. In other words, the thin, hollow material body encompasses and carries these invisible forces and the intensity of the composition’s “Force—Body.”

These sculpted figures, formed from space and a surface layer, have not only retained their solidity and volume despite the void within, but through their outer shells formed from broken and indented slices of metal they have constructed an outline of the body that conveys weight. They further allow the metal, force-effected, broken and indented, pierced through and strung together as it is, to be extruded into a brand-new form itself organized by those forces. However, what is the nucleus of that power?

The most direct explanation is that whilst the artist is in the process of creation, it is only natural that the strength of hand and the raw materials come into direct and powerful confrontation. Otherwise, perhaps it can be said that it is the continuous roaming power of the creator’s thoughts and vision. When LEE Kuang-Yu’s creative vocabulary shifted from western realist figures to a whole-hearted embodiment of eastern meditation, and from substantial sculpted bodies to hollow created realms, he created a richer, more complex aesthetic space.At present, LEE Kuang-Yu is once again exploring inwards and is using the hollow forms of his sculptures to reflect a potential force that cannot be seen. On one hand, this reflects the complex interchange between the creative process of the artist and external social relations; on the other it also reflects that amid a journey through art history, one must both continuously depart from and continue to develop one’s creative stance.Although LEE Kuang-Yu was long ago assigned a position of importance in Taiwanese sculptural history, his present cultivation of a new manner of expressing himself and his success in both preserving and advancing creative vitality lead to us to the question: will this affect the work of writing art history once more and will it produce a process of writing history that accompanies the creative process of the artist? Why exactly has this continued evolution and advance of impelled artist creativity and history writing – to the extent that at present it has become the artist’s core concern of the potential of life – come about? If we look at the world from a macroscopic viewpoint, and see the turns of the course of the artist’s life and the corresponding transformations of the heart as another part of a changing world (le monde en devenir); then what is the everlasting creative force that impels the world to keep rolling? I myself believe that it is not only the life force that artists rely on, but is also the source of the power that allows us to appreciate and discuss an artwork. It supports the existence of all life and things, so that they can exist but also are able to ceaselessly evolve, and is a prerequisite for innovation and new manifestations to emerge. French philosopher Henri Bergson in his works gives a moving saying. He describes the universe as an immense lifeform, perpetually changing, ceaselessly creating, evolving and multiplying. All that exists in the world, that changes, all joys and sorrows, all the revolutions of fate and even death originates in arbitrary, immeasurable changes of this lifeform. The movements of this gargantuan are linked by a majestic, billowing force; and this mysterious force is given a magnificent, lofty name: it is known as the “élan vital”.