The Glass Bead Game: Myungho Lee and Joo Yeon Woo
Curated by BYUL Collection Co., Ltd. FUZZY BLUE STAR
The Glass Bead Game ● BYUL COLLECTION Co., Ltd. aims to create a collection of works of art while being devoted to supporting and cultivating talented artists. Moreover, BYUL COLLECTION operates a new Project FUZZY BLUE STAR (aka F.B. Star) to introduce young emerging artists and to plan an annual group exhibition with contemporary international artists. ● In the contemporary art scene beyond the Post-Modern era, the Project is to provide a new alternative point of view that includes cultural pluralism and to introduce new emerging young artists beyond the major leading artists. Curated from this perspective, F. B. Star announces the first invited two-person show titled The Glass Bead Game: Artworks of Myungho Lee and Joo Yeon Woo.
The art works of Myungho Lee, which seem to portray trees drawn or canvas digitally manipulated on a computer, invokes, on the surface, visual curiosity because several interesting factors. His works include components that stimulate viewers’ atheistic senses and quickly penetrate into the communication with the public. However, we find that his intention is to include more complex factors in addition to the visual satisfaction by atheistic focus.
He first finds a suitable tree and installs a white screen of proper size. Except this installation, Myunghoo Lee reflects the nature through photography without applying any other manipulation. He defines his process of art making as a ‘performance-based project’. Such activities create outcomes that include various mediums and extend the traditional reproductive arts. He invites an attitude of painting style as well as installation and performance into photography and absorbs the surrounding spaces.
The series Drinking Your Surroundings by Joo Yeon Woo follows the same line, as she also explores spatial domain with objects that we can easily find in daily lives. The series, on which she has been working for five years in international locations, creates the artist’s own space that provides new experiences to viewers by combining glass cups with various objects, like buildings and natural objects, which could be found in her nomadic life. To Joo Yeon Woo, glass cups reflect another canvas. She recreates glass cups to form spaces that overpass the restriction of canvas. The spaces within which she combines unfamiliar objects from her daily life prove that she exists. In spite of this, the artworks of Myungho Lee and Joo Yeon Woo, which describe the artists’ inner world, display the objects’ narrative characteristics. Their activities seem like Knecht’s.
In the two artists’ artworks, we find the aspects of Perrot (the Glass Bead Game’s inventor), who created an imaginary space called Castalia, who organized, developed, and manipulated music and other subjects through glass beads, and who crossed over the boundaries between various art disciplines. The artists developed their own “glass bead games” through spaces, reproducing their own Platonic utopia. Their sharp points of view reflect humans’ broad daily environments and domains, reaching the current art scene that longs for more advanced and unified arts. The spatial bead games of the two artists step up to general and unified arts by combining disjoint spaces. – Eunkyung Lee
Eunkyung Lee (2009, March), “The Glass Bead Game” (Exhibition Review of a Two-Person Show), Neolook.com, Published in Korean
Available at: https://neolook.com/archives/20090320d