It creates the unique form, style, and concept of the “void,” and demonstrates “the concept of silent void in the Oriental culture” that embodies the state of unifying the object and the self. It not only displays aesthetic values but also reveals the artist's contemplation on the state of life at that moment, conveying contemporary social implications.
LEE Kuang-Yu’s new works initiate a further unique orientation of the spaces of his sculptural vocabulary. The former volume has dissolved and retreated from his forms.
Lin Hong-John Director, Department of Fine Arts, Taipei National University of the Arts
It is ‘ahistoricism’ that defines the assimilation process required to fuse oneself into another culture – Lacan, 1901-1981
Hegel’s “Aesthetics” is one constituent part of the discussion on the phenomenon that is art. In the contemporary era, people are most familiar with Hegel’s theory of the ‘end of art’ and associated writings. Yet people often forget that this book was the first book to systematically introduce the visual arts. It classifies style, media, category, and related art forms into different categories for discussion, while simultaneously attempting to establish a “world” as territory for the development of the arts. Hegel’s aesthetic image of the world, as one might expect, is entirely Western-centric, using Greece and Rome as the beginning of Western art history. There is a tendency to overlook or give ignorant descriptions of other regions and countries: Africa is culturally merely a “dark continent,” Asia is represented by a Hindu religious statue, and China is depicted by its Buddhist arts. Various extracts of Hegel’s work, describe Asian art and especially Chinese Buddhist sculpture as displaying the values of a “thought” culture – works tend to emphasize the proportions of the physical body and posture as well as their interaction, rather than showing the “dynamic.” Even though Hegel’s readings are mistaken, they might suggest something about the current “void” in the history of Taiwanese sculptural forms. It hints that in comparison with other forms of art, sculpture is a visual, modelled art, and its forms produce particular manners of perception. In aesthetic sense, it exhibits characteristic cultural and societal differences.
Today, as art continues to globalize, appropriateness and timeliness are necessities. Therefore, it follows that local sculptural development often trends towards a state of vacancy. This is especially true of sculpture that works within the confines of a particular genre: as compared with other arts, it is burdened with cultural and historical processes and encoded in political realities. As such, the lack of a historical narrative for sculpture is displayed within the ‘end’ of geographic art movements, and in a kind of inexpressible difficulty. This is because the local historical sculptural process cannot be cribbed into to the ideological, inevitable evolution of the European and American art history narrative. In regional sculptural development, especially in contemporary sculptures, there is an aim that must be re-examined as the cultural orientation that sculpture co-exists within acts to form a series of artistic waves. This is the optimal, clearest pattern for consciousness of aesthetic attitudes. In regional sculpture, a variety of styles and ideologies can co-exist together without conflict. Sculpture’s particular historical context is framed within the designations laid by artistic writing, which is a constantly ahistoricizing display of the assimilation process.
In Taiwan’s sculptural development, LEE Kuang-Yu’s emergence is isolated case within the prevailing Western sculptural language. His work transcends both cultural and historical dimensions in its narrative style. The peculiarities of Lee’s work present themselves in the visual styles of perspective, mass, movement, texture, and poses, while containing the cultural coordinates of Buddhism, Daoism, and modern ideologies. Like a collage, his sculptures show the lacunae in historical sense. This is at the real core of “ahistoricity”: the display of completeness within the exception, rather than special case within a seemingly complete historical narrative. Lee’s educational background was such that he spent his early years amidst Europe’s post-colonial history, while internally maintaining a special Eastern style of sculpting. Evidently, the many forms of modern Western sculpture could not fully satisfy him and served merely as an aesthetic reference, as when he ‘borrows’ from artistic ideologies from Cubism to Surrealism, and minimalist sculpture and takes them into consideration within his works. Meanwhile, Lee also represents the first group of Taiwanese artists to study overseas. He returned to the ranks of his college education and engaged in artistic creations and publications, beginning dialogues across Taiwan’s cultural field, developing new topics of aesthetic exploration, and training young artists, while initiating the late 80s professionalization of local intellectual production.
The extraordinary nature of Lee’s aesthetics is marked by his firm foundations in local culture. Lee’s sculptures act as a ‘minor literature’, operating within the confines of local artistic categories. They use a common language to express a private narrative, as in management of form, sculpture’s techniques, style and materials themselves rely on the continuation of the culture in which they exist and have meaning. Like Lee’s work Meditation II (fig.1) which stands in the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts: by use of the inclination of the entrance of the building itself, it creates a ‘Can you see it?’ style of visual landscape. At the same time, it is also a modelled metaphor, given corporeal substance in the deeply contemplative form of the sculpture itself, granting an oblique, glimpse of a design landscape. The spatial vocabulary of the piece on one hand displays the oppositions of modernist language, and on the other produces a graceful, elegant space. LEE Kuang-Yu has asked us: if art lies in presentation of a ‘visual illusion’, then through a filter of that visual illusion and by strategic positioning (ie the entrance) within the display space, the understanding of the artistic space of the piece and its form changes. This is through the practice of spatial strategies which make art conspicuous in its location, so that is glimpsed as you enter. And this kind of mechanism is not the manipulation of form and language, but is the manipulation of topological space. It is also in a sense symbolic of the themes of culture and history.
This is precisely because LEE Kuang-Yu’s sculptures are not closed discourses, nor are they traditionally contextualized displays. His works are a creative hybrid, continuously reinterpreting tradition and modernity: Western art transformed into Taiwanese modern art, and displaying subject matter drawn from the Taiwanese cultural arena and its history. Lee’s work is a reaction to the hybrid essence of culture. Inspect his works and they show that the coherent inevitability displayed in textual histories is a mistake of time, as in Hegel’s aesthetics when he mentions the ‘thought’ space that belongs to the East, this is an aesthetic which is omitted from customary Western contexts. In the universal situation of local modern art, the double weights of history/present, local/Western are implicated and set forth in the works themselves. LEE Kuang-Yu’s works are spaces filled with cultural and political meaning, and are also a ‘forced’ aesthetic declaration of a local culture. His break from continuation of Western sculptural history has also ‘forced’ a liberation from traditional definitions. The cultural space that LEE Kuang-Yu displays is the result of a different cultural, political and social framework that is changing, that is pushed, and squeezed and morphed. It reflects themes from outside the symbolic violence and breaking and re-establishing that characterize contemporary culture. The structural change of the cultural sphere yet emerges in Li Kuang-Yu’s works, combining a concentrated east and west in his simple, rounded and harmonious sculptural vocabulary. This process of the evolution of the cultural subjectivity of form uses sculpture, a topic imbued with history, to reflect that in the contemporary vocabulary of form and space, such paradoxical inevitability lies only in the work as presented within its cultural body. The previous dialectics of history and style, form and content become conceptually ‘ready-made objects’, and are peeled away from what were originally meaningful concepts and metaphors.
LEE Kuang-Yu’s new works initiate a further unique orientation of the spaces of his sculptural vocabulary. The former volume has dissolved and retreated from his forms. The continuously crossing and retracting, this vocabulary of architectural space that resembled constructivism, often displays a characteristic penetration of space – particularly in representation of defined figures. Both abstract and realist in nature – this is reflected in the superimposing of hollow and solid spaces – the slight yet perfect compositions of his sculptures demonstrate a purity of thought in his approach to creation. These statues, created from the interaction of flat planes and solids have a symbolic performativity. In the persistent transformation of forms – in the penetration and link of expanding, constructing, vanishing, and appearing-the works invite viewers to playful observation, to shift their perspective. The subjects of the works are not engaged in some set, purposeful work or action. On the contrary, they often are engaged in apparently aimless thinking and reflection. The freedom of such non-action is even more prominently displayed in Lee’s latest works. The organization of hollow and solid spaces further identifies the visual organization mechanisms of the viewer’s position.
The act of observation is necessarily a state produced from between the opposition of the objective and the subjective. Following on from this, it is a consciousness of the position of the subject and of others, although a genuine ‘gaze’ must attain a situation wherein object and subject can be exchanged. Within LEE Kuang-Yu’s graceful, penetrated negative spaces, the frame of the body and the creative vocabulary that scatters itself across virtual and realm realms, spatial strategies that borrow views and shift constantly, form a kind of reflexive visual mechanism, thereby affecting the state in which the viewer finds his or herself viewing: is this an actual head, hand or foot, or is it an abstract spatialized torso?
This method, by which pieces may be observed by views from all angles, disassociates the viewer from the confrontation of observing and emphasizes the on-the-spot experience of the sculpture. Amid the complex iterations produced by movement around the form, meaning itself is constituted. Ceaselessly collapsing and recombining, between the free connections made in the broken, collapsed image and the beauty of the complete, the relationship between viewer and piece is a compelled state of self-constituted aggressivity. This illustrates that the fantasy formed by the subject is an interactive subjectivity transformed by different conversions of structures and relationships. In Lee’s works, within the evolution and reorganization of forms, there is no one correct shape. Instead, it is between the structural presentation of the artwork and themes, the interactive recognition constellations of the observer, between the tearing apart of form and its breakdown that the artwork takes shape. Or that is to say, the viewer’s observation mechanism – its pull and its distance – are constituted from both sides: the gaze captures the subject, and the subject releases ‘the observation’; An objective (other) standpoint sees what happens to the subject’s gaze. In modelling a sculpture, the awareness of the position of subject and other mobilizes the confrontation between the viewing states of the two sides.
Inside these hollow spaces, what else can bring forth such “being-look-at-ness” spaces that fill the subjective gaze? LEE Kuang-Yu’s works show how a sculpture can transform the landscape of emptiness: a micro-spatializing observation mechanism that simultaneously displaces the viewing subject into a scene that can be viewed and that is also unviewable, that shelters the eye and gaze within. The sculpture acts as an autonomous form of art that must from be unfolded from amid its relationship with the surrounding topology. Through form, contents, media, practice, and other specifications, his sculptures return to the logic of “viewing,” thereby giving observers a way to measure scale. Thus, if manipulation of the structures of aesthetic consciousness do not become a conceptualized historical operation, nor become the presentation of a typical historical process.The landscape of voids and spaces in Lee’s works incorporate background and surrounding objects into the work, making them a timeless common symbol of ahistoricism. They became a textual forms, able to be viewed, observed, and referenced. Furthermore, Lee’s works have a certain peculiarity, in reacting to the conditions of space and including the intercommunicating spaces of “being” and “unbeing.” This groundless, unlocatable place is the allegorical space of a “utopian impulse in a post-utopian world.” Lee’s works operate through the topological spatial relations of non-political subjects. This is a subjective declaration laid out in a work of art, they represent a “micro-political” artistic subjectivity, framed by the cultural realities of real-life situations.
The a-historicism displayed in the empty spaces of Lee’s works is the voice of a “new historicism.” This is a “meta-language” assembled in his forms, and even more so is the representation of the specific symbols of a cultural context. In the reflection of every artistic aesthetic form, emancipating oneself from the recognition and relationship to the pictorial from outside the local and displaying an aesthetic stance is a micropolitical cultural context. Corresponding to the void in local sculptural history, LEE Kuang-Yu’s creations and the historical position they represent must fill this position; in other words, it is necessary to look towards LEE Kuang-Yu to address the historical voids in sculpture, because when writing about art history one must establish a common societal foundation, whether history is present or absent. Therefore, the question of aesthetics is a ethically cultural discussion. Once, ethical theory emphasized doing the “right” thing, a “beauty” without purpose and without utility: an autonomous realm of play. This corresponds with Hegel’s somewhat oblique reading of Chinese art, that this void is the true problem to which all art should respond: an object that is necessarily formed by thought and culture.
Viewing LEE Kuang-Yu from the spaces within
It is ‘ahistoricism’ that defines the assimilation process required to fuse oneself into another culture – Lacan, 1901-1981
Hegel’s “Aesthetics” is one constituent part of the discussion on the phenomenon that is art. In the contemporary era, people are most familiar with Hegel’s theory of the ‘end of art’ and associated writings. Yet people often forget that this book was the first book to systematically introduce the visual arts. It classifies style, media, category, and related art forms into different categories for discussion, while simultaneously attempting to establish a “world” as territory for the development of the arts. Hegel’s aesthetic image of the world, as one might expect, is entirely Western-centric, using Greece and Rome as the beginning of Western art history. There is a tendency to overlook or give ignorant descriptions of other regions and countries: Africa is culturally merely a “dark continent,” Asia is represented by a Hindu religious statue, and China is depicted by its Buddhist arts. Various extracts of Hegel’s work, describe Asian art and especially Chinese Buddhist sculpture as displaying the values of a “thought” culture – works tend to emphasize the proportions of the physical body and posture as well as their interaction, rather than showing the “dynamic.” Even though Hegel’s readings are mistaken, they might suggest something about the current “void” in the history of Taiwanese sculptural forms. It hints that in comparison with other forms of art, sculpture is a visual, modelled art, and its forms produce particular manners of perception. In aesthetic sense, it exhibits characteristic cultural and societal differences.
Today, as art continues to globalize, appropriateness and timeliness are necessities. Therefore, it follows that local sculptural development often trends towards a state of vacancy. This is especially true of sculpture that works within the confines of a particular genre: as compared with other arts, it is burdened with cultural and historical processes and encoded in political realities. As such, the lack of a historical narrative for sculpture is displayed within the ‘end’ of geographic art movements, and in a kind of inexpressible difficulty. This is because the local historical sculptural process cannot be cribbed into to the ideological, inevitable evolution of the European and American art history narrative. In regional sculptural development, especially in contemporary sculptures, there is an aim that must be re-examined as the cultural orientation that sculpture co-exists within acts to form a series of artistic waves. This is the optimal, clearest pattern for consciousness of aesthetic attitudes. In regional sculpture, a variety of styles and ideologies can co-exist together without conflict. Sculpture’s particular historical context is framed within the designations laid by artistic writing, which is a constantly ahistoricizing display of the assimilation process.
In Taiwan’s sculptural development, LEE Kuang-Yu’s emergence is isolated case within the prevailing Western sculptural language. His work transcends both cultural and historical dimensions in its narrative style. The peculiarities of Lee’s work present themselves in the visual styles of perspective, mass, movement, texture, and poses, while containing the cultural coordinates of Buddhism, Daoism, and modern ideologies. Like a collage, his sculptures show the lacunae in historical sense. This is at the real core of “ahistoricity”: the display of completeness within the exception, rather than special case within a seemingly complete historical narrative. Lee’s educational background was such that he spent his early years amidst Europe’s post-colonial history, while internally maintaining a special Eastern style of sculpting. Evidently, the many forms of modern Western sculpture could not fully satisfy him and served merely as an aesthetic reference, as when he ‘borrows’ from artistic ideologies from Cubism to Surrealism, and minimalist sculpture and takes them into consideration within his works. Meanwhile, Lee also represents the first group of Taiwanese artists to study overseas. He returned to the ranks of his college education and engaged in artistic creations and publications, beginning dialogues across Taiwan’s cultural field, developing new topics of aesthetic exploration, and training young artists, while initiating the late 80s professionalization of local intellectual production.
The extraordinary nature of Lee’s aesthetics is marked by his firm foundations in local culture. Lee’s sculptures act as a ‘minor literature’, operating within the confines of local artistic categories. They use a common language to express a private narrative, as in management of form, sculpture’s techniques, style and materials themselves rely on the continuation of the culture in which they exist and have meaning. Like Lee’s work Meditation II (fig.1) which stands in the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts: by use of the inclination of the entrance of the building itself, it creates a ‘Can you see it?’ style of visual landscape. At the same time, it is also a modelled metaphor, given corporeal substance in the deeply contemplative form of the sculpture itself, granting an oblique, glimpse of a design landscape. The spatial vocabulary of the piece on one hand displays the oppositions of modernist language, and on the other produces a graceful, elegant space. LEE Kuang-Yu has asked us: if art lies in presentation of a ‘visual illusion’, then through a filter of that visual illusion and by strategic positioning (ie the entrance) within the display space, the understanding of the artistic space of the piece and its form changes. This is through the practice of spatial strategies which make art conspicuous in its location, so that is glimpsed as you enter. And this kind of mechanism is not the manipulation of form and language, but is the manipulation of topological space. It is also in a sense symbolic of the themes of culture and history.
This is precisely because LEE Kuang-Yu’s sculptures are not closed discourses, nor are they traditionally contextualized displays. His works are a creative hybrid, continuously reinterpreting tradition and modernity: Western art transformed into Taiwanese modern art, and displaying subject matter drawn from the Taiwanese cultural arena and its history. Lee’s work is a reaction to the hybrid essence of culture. Inspect his works and they show that the coherent inevitability displayed in textual histories is a mistake of time, as in Hegel’s aesthetics when he mentions the ‘thought’ space that belongs to the East, this is an aesthetic which is omitted from customary Western contexts. In the universal situation of local modern art, the double weights of history/present, local/Western are implicated and set forth in the works themselves. LEE Kuang-Yu’s works are spaces filled with cultural and political meaning, and are also a ‘forced’ aesthetic declaration of a local culture. His break from continuation of Western sculptural history has also ‘forced’ a liberation from traditional definitions. The cultural space that LEE Kuang-Yu displays is the result of a different cultural, political and social framework that is changing, that is pushed, and squeezed and morphed. It reflects themes from outside the symbolic violence and breaking and re-establishing that characterize contemporary culture. The structural change of the cultural sphere yet emerges in Li Kuang-Yu’s works, combining a concentrated east and west in his simple, rounded and harmonious sculptural vocabulary. This process of the evolution of the cultural subjectivity of form uses sculpture, a topic imbued with history, to reflect that in the contemporary vocabulary of form and space, such paradoxical inevitability lies only in the work as presented within its cultural body. The previous dialectics of history and style, form and content become conceptually ‘ready-made objects’, and are peeled away from what were originally meaningful concepts and metaphors.
LEE Kuang-Yu’s new works initiate a further unique orientation of the spaces of his sculptural vocabulary. The former volume has dissolved and retreated from his forms. The continuously crossing and retracting, this vocabulary of architectural space that resembled constructivism, often displays a characteristic penetration of space – particularly in representation of defined figures. Both abstract and realist in nature – this is reflected in the superimposing of hollow and solid spaces – the slight yet perfect compositions of his sculptures demonstrate a purity of thought in his approach to creation. These statues, created from the interaction of flat planes and solids have a symbolic performativity. In the persistent transformation of forms – in the penetration and link of expanding, constructing, vanishing, and appearing-the works invite viewers to playful observation, to shift their perspective. The subjects of the works are not engaged in some set, purposeful work or action. On the contrary, they often are engaged in apparently aimless thinking and reflection. The freedom of such non-action is even more prominently displayed in Lee’s latest works. The organization of hollow and solid spaces further identifies the visual organization mechanisms of the viewer’s position.
The act of observation is necessarily a state produced from between the opposition of the objective and the subjective. Following on from this, it is a consciousness of the position of the subject and of others, although a genuine ‘gaze’ must attain a situation wherein object and subject can be exchanged. Within LEE Kuang-Yu’s graceful, penetrated negative spaces, the frame of the body and the creative vocabulary that scatters itself across virtual and realm realms, spatial strategies that borrow views and shift constantly, form a kind of reflexive visual mechanism, thereby affecting the state in which the viewer finds his or herself viewing: is this an actual head, hand or foot, or is it an abstract spatialized torso?
This method, by which pieces may be observed by views from all angles, disassociates the viewer from the confrontation of observing and emphasizes the on-the-spot experience of the sculpture. Amid the complex iterations produced by movement around the form, meaning itself is constituted. Ceaselessly collapsing and recombining, between the free connections made in the broken, collapsed image and the beauty of the complete, the relationship between viewer and piece is a compelled state of self-constituted aggressivity. This illustrates that the fantasy formed by the subject is an interactive subjectivity transformed by different conversions of structures and relationships. In Lee’s works, within the evolution and reorganization of forms, there is no one correct shape. Instead, it is between the structural presentation of the artwork and themes, the interactive recognition constellations of the observer, between the tearing apart of form and its breakdown that the artwork takes shape. Or that is to say, the viewer’s observation mechanism – its pull and its distance – are constituted from both sides: the gaze captures the subject, and the subject releases ‘the observation’; An objective (other) standpoint sees what happens to the subject’s gaze. In modelling a sculpture, the awareness of the position of subject and other mobilizes the confrontation between the viewing states of the two sides.
Inside these hollow spaces, what else can bring forth such “being-look-at-ness” spaces that fill the subjective gaze? LEE Kuang-Yu’s works show how a sculpture can transform the landscape of emptiness: a micro-spatializing observation mechanism that simultaneously displaces the viewing subject into a scene that can be viewed and that is also unviewable, that shelters the eye and gaze within. The sculpture acts as an autonomous form of art that must from be unfolded from amid its relationship with the surrounding topology. Through form, contents, media, practice, and other specifications, his sculptures return to the logic of “viewing,” thereby giving observers a way to measure scale. Thus, if manipulation of the structures of aesthetic consciousness do not become a conceptualized historical operation, nor become the presentation of a typical historical process.The landscape of voids and spaces in Lee’s works incorporate background and surrounding objects into the work, making them a timeless common symbol of ahistoricism. They became a textual forms, able to be viewed, observed, and referenced. Furthermore, Lee’s works have a certain peculiarity, in reacting to the conditions of space and including the intercommunicating spaces of “being” and “unbeing.” This groundless, unlocatable place is the allegorical space of a “utopian impulse in a post-utopian world.” Lee’s works operate through the topological spatial relations of non-political subjects. This is a subjective declaration laid out in a work of art, they represent a “micro-political” artistic subjectivity, framed by the cultural realities of real-life situations.
The a-historicism displayed in the empty spaces of Lee’s works is the voice of a “new historicism.” This is a “meta-language” assembled in his forms, and even more so is the representation of the specific symbols of a cultural context. In the reflection of every artistic aesthetic form, emancipating oneself from the recognition and relationship to the pictorial from outside the local and displaying an aesthetic stance is a micropolitical cultural context. Corresponding to the void in local sculptural history, LEE Kuang-Yu’s creations and the historical position they represent must fill this position; in other words, it is necessary to look towards LEE Kuang-Yu to address the historical voids in sculpture, because when writing about art history one must establish a common societal foundation, whether history is present or absent. Therefore, the question of aesthetics is a ethically cultural discussion. Once, ethical theory emphasized doing the “right” thing, a “beauty” without purpose and without utility: an autonomous realm of play. This corresponds with Hegel’s somewhat oblique reading of Chinese art, that this void is the true problem to which all art should respond: an object that is necessarily formed by thought and culture.