MAGNETIC FIELDS

Sympathetic connections as well as productive tensions run through Magnetic Fields. Lee Bul, the eldest of the artists here, has developed a distinguished oeuvre over several decades with works that explore the experiential and ideological dimensions of the posthuman body. The Perdu series of wall works on view, while sensuously painterly, elaborates on motifs from her early biomorphic sculptures, the fusion of mechanical and organic forms that delve into questions surrounding the body in a culture increasingly permeated by technology.

Heecheon Kim, the youngest in the show, born around the the dawn of the Internet, takes up related issues in multimedia works examining both the pleasures and anxieties of a techno-utopian society which promises to loosen the self from corporeal bounds. In Ghost (1990), a VR work based on an actual incident involving an acquaintance paralyzed in a weightlifting accident, the artist probes the untranslatable gaps between reality and pseudo- and parallel realities, generating moments of unexpected emotional resonance.

VR technologies have also played a role in the work of Jin Han Lee, though as a means to reconsider timeless questions of representational space in the traditional medium of painting. Having long worked between London and Seoul, she has developed an intimate pictorial language—by turns sensuous, exuberant, and poignant—that attempts to convey the fragmented, ineffable moments in the spatial and linguistic interstices of her personal experience.