Lee Kiil
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| Papa's band OB's Cabin mixed media, live, 860x420x490cm 2009 |
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| Grassland 1969-2009 song by He5, Yongnam Cho, 00:03:52 HD 2009 |
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| Label Ink-jet print, 105x105cm 2010 |
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| Label Ink-jet print, LP, mobile, 40x40x40cm 2010 |
Romanticism, As Conceived by Lee Kiil
Kim Mi-jin,
Professor of Hongik University Graduate School of Fine Arts
Lee Kiil, who has mainly made robots with packs of cigarettes using brands such as Marlboro and Raison, worked recently with the subject matter of 60s Korean music bands. Lee interviews members of groups, collects materials about them, and reenacts their concerts. Lee has interest in a wide spectrum of cultural contexts, moving in reverse through time. In his recent work Exploding Youth exploring Korean music bands, contemporary bands, and The Beatles in the 1960s, he pays attention to how hybridization and settlement of culture was executed within political, economical, and social situations of the times. Like a documentary producer, Lee presents in a narrative manner a hybrid contact of cultures and the birth and extinction of mass culture through photography, video, interview, and stage reenactment.
After World War II, international stability and affluence gave birth to mass culture. The Beatles especially made a massive impact on the world. The group worked in the United States in 1964, and gained great success. In this year a Korean music band issued its first album. This band, composed of poor young intellectuals with an aspiration for music, performed at U.S. Army bases and tried to experience worldwide trends, listening to AFKN radio. The Kimches (1965, material offered by Shim Hyung-sup), including three singers, looked like an epigone of The Beatles, but worked to become a more prominent band than The Beatles.
The five members, found in a photograph of He 5 (1970, material offered by Cho Yong-nam), appear full of self-confidence and individuality. Despite their fashionable costumes, their worn-out shoes and crumpled trousers suggest they are penurious musicians. Lee collects traces of where they performed. His neon work OB’s Cabin is a signboard made of type used in promotional material for a legendary salon, introduced to Time magazine, loved by college students and youngsters, with performances by high fashion singers and rock bands. This space gained popularity and made an impact, embracing new music of the 1960s and 70s, beyond popular music genres such as ppongjjak and enka. Under a social environment dominated by ideologies and mottos of rapid economic growth, bands pined for freedom from oppression and control. Lee’s collecting involves an interview with Yi Nam-yi, member of Shin Jung-hyun and Coins (1974) and Love and Peace (1977), also a solo singer who sang the hit I Could Cry. Considered part of Hippy Culture, a hotbed of decaying culture according to the dictatorial regime, singers then were imposed with sanctions on their activities. But they soon returned to the music world, with the public’s preference seeking out another fashion.
Unlike present singers who are clever enough to use the capitalist system, such unhappy musicians who experienced enthusiasm and severance then, due to the political and social environment, had passion and thought romantically. Lee discovered an analog sensibility, as a middle generation artist, (close to the ‘uncle generation’) in the age of information. Investigating this relationship, e discovered a puzzle in culture and history, and provides an analog sensibility within that information. This is found in his 2010 work Label. Lee unfolds reality, not false imagery, through the stage of Papa’s Band and OB’s Cabin.
Lee formed a band with veteran musicians including Key Voice’s Kim Hong-tak, Babos’ Kim Sun, Hashicks’ Cho Yong-nam, and Great Birth’s Choi Chun-sup, and reenacted the stage at Ob’s Cabin salon at the 2009 Seoul Art Space Geumcheon resident artists exhibition. Lee plans to also perform with these members in Liverpool, home of The Beatles. Lee experiments with broadening his ctivities, overlapping his analog sensibility with digital culture. He merges his field as an artist with music, film, photography, and sculpture, extending the sphere of those socialized in a specific culture, as a collector, negotiator, producer, and cultural planner.
Inspired by The Beatles and Korean music band Hashicks, Lee works at the theme of advanced culture’s influence on the world, and developing countries’ culture not as epigone of advanced countries’ culture, but as an independent distinctive culture. He explores how a valid culture is settled or rooted within the deeds of artists, discovering significance through cultural generation and movement. Lee is an entertainer artist who uses and enjoys his status as mediator.
