Temporal Power– 2026 Digital photography, size variable. 
In Temporal Power, the portraits of 322 current (data collected in November 2025 from Wikipedia) presidents, prime ministers, and kings in the world are merged to create one average portrait.

The Congress, 2025. Oil on canvas, 130cm × 100cm
Inspired by past and present matrifocal and matrilineal societies, artist imagined a scene of a more egalitarian society where women are transmitting important knowledge, making key political decisions, surrounded by scenes of care and play.

Mago, her journeys to the west, 2025. Oil on canvas, 80cm × 100cm

Mago or Magu (in Chinese) is a goddess (Korea) or an immortal being (China), that appears in East Asian historical and religious texts, literature, folklore, folksongs, and art. The logographic meaning of 麻姑 (“Magu”) is given as “Hemp Maiden” or “Hemp Goddess.”

This work is a reinterpretation of Magocheji, a small painting (19.0×21.9㎝) by an artist named Seok Kyung (15th century, Joseon Dynasty). In Magocheji, Mago appears as a goddess who rules the world, much like in earlier myths. She is also portrayed as a nurturing figure, shown carrying a deer while searching for reishi mushrooms. One of the three primordial deities known as Samshin (three gods), Mago is said to have borne descendants without a partner and to bless her offspring with new life. Her gathering of reishi—the legendary “mushroom of immortality”—underscores her role as a giver of eternal vitality.

In the original painting Magocheji, the face of Mago is erased. By changing the face of the woman to the artist’s own face and the background to that of the artist’s immediate natural environment, she brings back Mago into the contemporary time, in her own context of maternity, the power of female knowledge and experience.

Nova Earth Odyssey – remastered in 2025
3D animation music video, 4minutes
Commissioned by Seoul Museum of Art

Nova Earth Odyssey is an animated music video that reimagines archetypal narratives from Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam through a woman-centered lens. Set on a distant, human-colonized planet, the story follows a visionary scientist who creates eight daughters—an interdependent collective designed to break humanity’s recurring cycles of systemic inequality. When an admirer’s error fractures their shared physical form, their presence doesn’t disappear; it transforms. Their teachings survive as a distributed consciousness, circulating through a vast mental network that transcends bodies and borders.

Blending sci-fi world-building with the stylized K-pop aesthetics, Nova Earth Odyssey confronts the masculine iconography embedded in religious mythology and capitalist storytelling. It proposes a radical inversion: that the very technologies and media shaped within patriarchal systems can be reclaimed, rerouted, and reimagined as instruments for a matrifocal future—one built on care and collectivity.

<노바 어쓰 오딧세이>는 불교, 기독교, 이슬람교의 서사를 여성 주인공으로 재해석한 3D 애니메이션 뮤직비디오이다. 이 이야기는 다른 행성을 배경으로, 인간의 체계적 불평등을 해결하기 위해 여덟 딸을 만들어낸 여성 과학자의 여정을 그린다. 그러나 그녀를 흠모하던 남성의 실수로 인해 딸들은 집단적인 힘을 잃게 되고, 그녀들의 가르침은 정신적 네트워크를 통해 다음 세대로 전해지게 된다.

이 프로젝트는 K-pop의 미학을 활용하여 종교와 자본주의 서사에 깊이 뿌리박힌 강력한 남성 이미지를 여성 중심의 비전으로 전복하고자 한다. 남성 중심 사회에서 발전한 도구와 기술인 3D 시뮬레이션, 게임 엔진, 인공지능 등을 가상의 모계사회를 상상하는 데 어떻게 재구성될 수 있는지를 보여주는 데 목적이 있다.

감독/제작 Direction/Production 이영주 Young Joo Lee
스토리보드 Storyboard 이영주 Young Joo Lee
AI 음악제작 AI Music Creation 이영주 Young Joo Lee
3D 모델링/애니메이션 3D Modeling/Animation 에드가 로메로 Edgar Romero
3D 렌더링 3D Rendering 에드가 로메로 Edgar Romero
편집/VFX Editing/VFX 이영주 Young Joo Lee
안무/보컬 Dance/Vocal Recording 이영주 Young Joo Lee
음악작곡/제작 Music composition/Production 노아-진우 뫼어벡 Noah-Jinu Moerbeck

Lizardians (2021) is a 3D computer-animated short set in a bio-capitalist factory owned by the RENEW corporation in a dystopic future. Having harnessed the axolotl salamander’s genetic powers of regeneration, RENEW harvests human body parts—selling a desire for eternal youth while profiting from ableism and trans-humanism.

Inside a parafictional retail-style display complete with RENEW commercials repeating on multiple television screens, Lee presents ceramic iPhone sculptures. Anonymous Worker 1-14 (all 2022) are handheld works that each display an oil painting where a screen might be, featuring portraits of present-day Chinese and Vietnamese factory workers and Congolese conflict minerals miners- the exploited laborers of multinational smartphone conglomerates.

Lizardians is inspired by the 2010 media coverage of two factories: a series of employee suicides at the Foxconn facility in Shenzhen, China and revelations that dozens of employees from a South Korean Samsung computer chip factory had been diagnosed with or died from nonhereditary diseases and rare illnesses due to unsafe working conditions. Drawing from life, Lee exaggerates and fictionalizes the brutal tactics of capitalism, but also finds poetry in the mundane of horror. Creative expression—freedom of the mind—is not a substitute for bodily autonomy and with LIZARDIANS, Lee illustrates the power and precarity of artistic production in the face of the global industrial complex.

Press Release

LIZARDIANS (2022), Image courtesy of OCHI, by Deen Babakhyi Ochi AUX, Los Angeles

Apparition, 2022.
ceramic masks, modified virtual reality headset, metal stand, chair, VR video, dimensions variable, 4 min 40 sec.
(On the monitor: Jaguar’s Vision, 2021, Digital animation, 3min 50sec, sound by Cristian Amigo)
Music composition: Jacob Cooper
Commissioned by ARKO Museum
Photo by Chulki Hong

In Apparition, the artist portrays an image of the relationship between nature and humans by revisiting her own experience with a local therapist in South America, using four ceramic masks each representing land/roots, a lizard, a jaguar, and a raven. The fifth mask is a transformed virtual reality headset rendered from an endangered musk deer, representing the last moments of countless animals and plants that once existed on Earth. The audience experiences the last moments of this musk deer through VR video and participates in the ceremony to honor the spirits of endangered species.

〈환영〉, 2022, 도자 가면들, 변형된 가상현실 헤드셋, 금속 스탠드, 의자, VR 비디오, 가변 설치, 3분 50초
음악 작곡: 제이콥 쿠퍼
아르코미술관 지원 제작
사진 촬영: 홍철기

〈환영〉에서 작가는 남아메리카의 전통 치유사를 통해 경험했던 자연과 인간 사이의 관계에 대한 이미지를 땅/뿌리, 도마뱀, 표범, 까마귀를 상징하는 4개의 도자 가면들로 표현한다. 다섯 번째 가면은 멸종 위기에 처한 사향노루를 가상현실 헤드셋으로 변형한 가면으로, 지구상에 존재했던 수많은 동식물들의 마지막 순간들을 대변해 보여준다. VR 영상을 통해 사향노루의 마지막 순간을 경험한 관객들은 멸종 위기에 처한 종들의 영혼을 기리기 위한 제의식에 동참한다.

Installation views

Digital Animation installation, 3 minutes (loop), Excerpt from the animation
Commissioned by Magnum Photos + AMI Paris

Most South Koreans live in cities, and most of those city dwellers live in apartment buildings. I grew up in different apartment buildings over the years. The first building I remember was five stories high. We lived on the second floor. I don’t remember who lived on which floor, but I remember there was a boy that I fancied living on the fifth floor. This building was destroyed during the course of urban redevelopment. Now, there are buildings that are thirty to thirty-five stories high standing in its place.

The second building that I remember living in was twenty stories high, and we lived on the nineteenth floor. My parents still live there. The buildings are numbered according to the complex to which they belong—there are more than twenty in each complex and fourteen complexes in the city I grew up in. There are two families on each floor, so there are forty families living in the entire building. Some apartment buildings have ten or more families living on each floor in smaller apartments. A long corridor connects each home.

The apartment building was never quiet. It always had new stories. There were comedies as well as tragedies. Once, a mother of three daughters started a fire in her own home after having a severe fight with her husband. The flame left black marks that reached the seventh floor. This planned accident made me think about “family” from a different perspective. This was not an isolated event though. There were nights when I woke up to the sound of someone crying, dishes breaking, and doors slamming.

Because there were so many families living in each building, noise was often an issue. Sometimes there were incidents where neighbors fought because of the noise level. There’s an inter-phone in each house. You can call the building manager, who lives on the ground floor of the building, to connect to other tenants in the building or report any problems. The building manager, whose job was to watch over this apartment building and answer the inter-phone disappeared with the emergence of automated gates and finger-print recognition systems. An elevator connects the floors and transports the bodies vertically. There’s also the under-used staircase. I still remember how each floor had its own smell and decorations.

The conception of Apartment 2022 came from these detailed recollections of the apartment building that I used to live, and the people living in it. It shows the parallel lives of different families in the building, showing the differences among the sameness of each floor.

Borrowing from my memories and imagining what might be happening behind the closed doors, I created different compositions of families ranging from nuclear family with mother, father, and children, to same-sex couples, and non-human families. By bringing all different forms of families together into one visual plane, I show the diverse forms of families, and how they coexist.

THRENOS (for the throat)
… Ashamed and ashamed for being ashamed we look away and ask for you to do the same—

The transition from animal to meat is one that intentionally mutes the life and death of its subject. Unlike humans, these animals generally die in concealment, and the dead are not mourned. In Threnos, what is so often hidden behind the scenes is brought onto the stage in a para-liturgical rite, a performance that offers space for reckoning and reflection. Throughout, the throat acts as a kind of locus—a metaphorical and literal site of language, ingestion, song, slaughter, swallowing, and vulnerability, connecting the mourners and the mourned in their shared physicality.

Composer / concept: Jacob Cooper (USA)
Direction / concept: Karmina Šilec  (SI)
Texts: Dora Malech (USA)
Video: Young Joo Lee (KR, USA)
Set: Dorian Šilec Petek (SI)
Costumes: Tina Bonča (SI)
Light: Andrej Hajdinjak (SI)
Sound: Danilo Ženko (SI)

Performed by: New Music Theatre Choregie (SI)
Production: Carmina Slovenica 2017- 2020
Co-production: Maribor Puppet Theatre

Prepremiere: 9. 3. 2020, Minoriti, Maribor
OPERADAGEN (NL)
THRENOS (for the Throat)
streaming world premiere on ODR TV #6, 14.5.2020

2021, digital animation, 03′ 50″
Animation/ Story by Young Joo Lee
Sound by Cristian Amigo

Jaguar’s Vision is a short animation film narrating an encounter between four humans living in a jungle and a jaguar. In the past, humans continued to live as a part of nature – learning from nature, revering nature, and understanding nature in its wondrous existence. Nature was a realm of life in which humans can gather food and sustain life, but at the same time, a realm of cruel and ruthless competition in which different elements threatened their survival. Humans have survived in nature through cooperation. The current global spread of COVID- 19 proves that cooperation between both individuals and collectives remains crucial for human survival even in contemporary times. As humans cemented their position as the dominating species in nature, they became the fearless of the world. However, the power dynamics between humans and nature still persists through the conflicts between individuals, collectives, nations, and races. Through this work, I wanted to question what humans have lost in relationships with one another at the cost of declaring themselves as the dominators of nature, and by so doing, understand the origins of chaos we are experiencing today.

In Jaguar’s Vision, the jaguar represents nature, which was once revered as sacred by humans (Jaguars are considered sacred in South America). By turning jaguars into objects and commodities, humans exploit nature as a mirror onto which they project their desires. In creating the animation, I referenced the realistic yet frozen look of dioramas in natural history museums. Sound for the film was made by sound designer and musician, Christian Amigo.

In Search of the Lost Tiger – Installation
2020
Vinyl sheet, monitors, speakers
Size variable

This installation at Coreana Museum of Art in Seoul brings together my research behind the making of <Paradise Limited>.
The VR documentation of the exhibition is available HERE. In Search of the Lost Tiger is located in the Part 2 of the exhibition. Currently, the exhibition is touring to Russia.

Paradise Limited (2017) is a 3-channel animation work based on my year-long research on the nature sanctuary that exists at the Korean Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) and the mythology created around this zone. I spent two weeks journeying along the DMZ, which I documented as a drawing on a 25-meter long paper (each 10km of the trip translated into 1m in the drawing). This later became the background of this animation work.
As a South Korean, DMZ always has been a place of fear, mystery, fascination and hope. In elementary school we sang the song of reunification and watched the documentary about the hard life in North Korea. For South Korean Men, through the obligatory military service, some are assigned to serve near the DMZ.
I decided to go on this journey after I read the article about Sun Nam Lim, so called Tiger Lim, who believed that there are wild Korean tigers still existing close to the DMZ. I heard about the endangered animal and plant species existing inside the DMZ, but it was the first time I heard about a tiger. I was skeptical but also fascinated to read this article, because Korean tigers were massacred during the Japanese colonial period and finally lost their habitat completely during the Korean War. Tiger is a national symbol and it appears very often in Korean folktales and in religious paintings as a spiritual animal. I wanted to go on a journey to trace the history of this animal in Korean peninsula, and how tigers still live in people’s mind as a spiritual animal even after its extinction.
The drawings, interview materials, rumors I collected along this journey became the materials to construct the world of Paradise Limited.

The interview with Tiger Lim can be found here.

Technology enables different artistic possibilities and expressions. At the same time, technology reflects the perspectives and values of the developer/maker that can exclude the perspectives and values of minorities. The 3-D animation installation, Lizardians, shows this double-edged quality of emerging technology by imagining a parallel world in which the human body parts are manufactured and sold as beauty and health product.

Festivals / Screenings
Siggraph Asia 2022, Art Gallery, Daejeon, South Korea (upcoming- December 2022)
Supernova 7th Dimension Digital Animation Festival 2022, Focal Competition Grand Prize, Denver, CO, USA
Seoul Indie Animation Festival, Independent Walk, Seoul, South Korea
DAFT × A&T Festival, Taiwan & Korea Video Exchange Festival, Taipei, Taiwan
Athens International Film & Video Festival 2021, Athens, OH, USA
GLAS Animation Festival 2021, US Competition, Online
Tricky Women/Tricky Realities Animation Festival 2021, Competition 5, Vienna, Austria
Exhibition Brochure – 탈영역 우정국 Post Territory Ujeongguk, Seoul, Korea

Lizardians, 2021
3-channel 3-D animated short, 24′ 47″
Single-channel duration: 25′ 12″

Lizardians is a 3-D animation short that depicts a reality in which a technology that applies the axolotl salamander’s genetic powers of regeneration to the human body has been commercialized for mass consumption. Beyond neoliberalism and cognitive capitalism, Lizardians is set in a biocapitalist factory where conflict arises between protagonists from different classes as they question the value of labor, creativity, agency, and authorship. Each of the three channels embodies part of the story, like limbs to a whole: a regenerator (Lizardian), a janitor, and the RENEW corporation itself. Shelby endures pain, immobility, and isolation in order to perform her job of regrowing her limbs, while Caleb works in the disposal department of the factory and in his spare time salvages defective human limbs to make art. As he develops a following on social media and begins to sell artwork made of company property, RENEW intervenes. Shelby and Caleb’s synchronous yet contrasting lives unfold separately until all three channels merge as they meet at the opening reception of Caleb’s exhibition featuring sculptures made with some of Shelby’s body parts.
Lizardians was conceptualized after encountering international media coverage of two incidents that occurred in quick succession in 2010—a series of employee suicides at the Foxconn factory and industrial park in Shenzhen, China and revelations that workers in the semiconductor industry had been diagnosed with or died from nonhereditary maladies and rare illnesses including miscarriages, heart disease, and cancer in South Korea since the mid 1990s. At the time, Taiwanese multinational contract manufacturer Foxconn was the largest producer of electronic parts for global corporations such as Apple, HP, Blackberry, and Nokia, producing parts for smartphones, computers, and other ubiquitous electronic devices used around the world daily. Many of its workers relocate from rural areas to Shenzhen at a young age to make money to support their families back home. Working notoriously long hours doing tedious labor for low wages, Foxconn workers suffer from the physically demanding work and the psychological distress of living far from family and friends. Samsung, one of the major semiconductor manufacturing companies in South Korea, was also at the center of controversy, disputing the connection between factory working conditions and their employees’ health problems—though the company officially apologized to the family of Hwang Yu-Mi 11 years after she died of leukemia at age 22. 

There are similarities in the unethical operations of global corporations such as these that include the exploitation and casual disregard for human life. When challenged, these companies simply moved their factories to less regulated Southeast Asian locations, where similar problems continue to occur. As customers and consumers, we are not given access to the stories of those who produce the goods we use. The shiny and slick surfaces of these electronics sold in similarly shiny and slick stores are designed to make us forget the hands that made the parts and assembled our devices. What if the products for sale resembled the individual workers’ physical appearances? How would a worker feel to see the result of that labor for sale, detached from their own body? Through Lizardians, the power relationship between an individual and a corporation is given shape and the moral responsibilities of living in a world increasingly dominated by corporations comes into question. 

As the narrative of Lizardians progresses, Caleb  temporarily escapes his reality through the use of social media. Reflecting upon the ways in which we engage with artworks and each other through corporate controlled digital platforms such as Instagram, all art and experience is transformed into small, flat images. This psychological distance has the power to reframe even the most gruesome human limb sculptures as exotic yet digestible pixels intended for short attention spans. As the distance from the reality and context of an object grows, our understanding of both objects and reality becomes abstracted—distorted, simplified, and beautified—and over time our perceptions become so numb that we seek out new and more outrageous filters. Towards the end of the video, as one protagonist destroys the sculptures, the lens of social media is momentarily shattered along with  its all powerful beautifying filter and for a brief moment, perception opens to reality.

Director / Writer/ Producer – Young Joo Lee
Storyboard – Young Joo Lee

CAST
Shelby – Young Joo Lee
Caleb – Kayodè Soyemi
Older Ballerina – Ellen Press
Monica, Gallerist – Dina M.Selimovic
Collector – Brandon Keeton
Factory Worker 1 – Joe Bagtas
Factory Worker 2 – Mack Kuhr
Factory Dorm Mate – Dan Chen
Homeless Woman – Melissa Chambers
Information Desk Employee – Madison Crawford
Curator – Kasey McNulty
Gallery Visitor – Brianne Buishas
Gallery Assistant – Lindsey Wilson

VOICE in the factory – Lindsey Wilson
Shelby’s sister – Ava Wyant
Recruitment Office Person – Brandon Robinson

Production
Lead 3D animation – Edgar Romero
3D animation – Bertrand Flanet / Lautaro Romero / Young Joo Lee
3D modeling – Edgar Romero / Volodymyr Khandoga / Young Joo Lee
3D architecture – Mike Kwok
Shelby’s factory costume designer – Hye-Seon Jeon
RENEW logo designer – YoE

Post Production 
Editing – Young Joo Lee
Original Music – Hae Jin Kang
Sound design – Myeong Soo Hwang
Graphic designer – Jae Jin Lee

Special Thanks
Julio Parra Martinez
Bianca Boragi
Edward Columbia
Ao Li
Stine Dahlman
Jiwon Ham
Dahae Jun
Kenneth Hughes
Dorian Mains
Clara Murgui
Linda Franke
Sonali Prasad
Prima Sakundabhai
Lior Shamriz

Sponsored by:
Seoul Foundation for the Arts and Culture
Harvard Film Study Center

Magic Kingdom
2020
Video game
Dimension variable

**Can only be played on Chrome and Internet Explorer browser

• Use the mouse to look around.
• Use arrow keys to move around the space. You can jump using the space bar.
• Knocking down the perfume bottles will reveal stories from the Magic Kingdom.
• Be careful not to touch the money that is not yours.

SUCCESS
2020
Perfume, styrofoam, acrylic glass
33 × 33 × 140cm
During the exhibition, the perfume was sprayed twice everyday on the cement copy of the perfume bottle.

2019
Digital Animation / Virtual Reality experience
Running Time: 09:15

Left Screen: The Wall
Concept/Visualization: Young Joo Lee
Visual/3D graphics: Hanna Noh

Right Screen: Borderline
Animation: Young Joo Lee

The Wall and Borderline is a two-screen video projection exploring borders and identity. The Wall juxtaposes historical images of European immigrants with contemporary Mexican migrants, highlighting parallels in migration and the ongoing xenophobia they face, while Borderline abstracts shifting boundaries into black-and-white animation, reflecting the changing dynamics of “self” and “other.”

Video experpt

2019 (sound remake in 2021)
Digital Animation
00:11:10
Writer, animator & sound: Young Joo Lee
Newsreel Source: Universal Newsreel, Ed Herlihy, broadcasted on August 5, 1946

From 1946 to 1958, the United States conducted 67 tests in the Marshall Islands. Black Snow is a tale based on the archival footage of these tests and their on-going threats imposed on the lives of the people and the environment of the islands. The native people living further from the Bikini Atoll (the site of the first atomic tests-Operation Crossroads) were not aware of the effect of the radiation at the time of the bombing. They were not informed properly. Some of the people mistook the nuclear fallouts as snow and ate them. The US government advised the people of the islands not to consume the local goods contaminated with radiation, such as coconuts, which were part of their staple diet. Instead, the US government provided processed food, which increased the rate of diabetes, obesity and other health issues on the islands.
The concrete dome, called theTomb by the locals is covering the nuclear waste dumped after the series of tests. It is already leaking, though the dome was promised to last for 20,000 years. The rising sea level and the aging concrete cover is a threat not only to the islanders, yet to the entire Pacific Ocean and the world.

Excerpt from the video (sound from 2021)

Dreaming Eggs is a fictional investigation by a woman, who tries to find the right sperm donor based on her memory of her childhood love. The screen captures the sperm donors’ childhood photos displayed on a sperm bank website. The potential customer can choose the ethnic root of the donor, academic accomplishments, personality, and the physical traits such as height, eye color and hair color. The other shopping websites and the descriptions and the photos of the products interrupt the woman’s search.
Her unresolved search for the lost childhood love and the right sperm donor continues in her dream, where she is confronted by the duality of romantic love and the artificiality of reproduction in contemporary society.

2018
Digital Video
Running Time: 07:04
Excerpt from the video

Eggvest Manual

Relief Supplies
2018
Chocolate, metal, aluminum powder, resin

Related work:
How to eat a bar of milk chocolate
2018
Digital Video
Running time: 05:05

video excerpt

2018
Animated Documentary
33 minutes

My name is Pa-Yun is an animated documentary about a man who escaped North Korea before the Korean War. His childhood to adolescence was affected by Japanese colonialism, the Russian invasion, the rise of the dictatorship in North Korea and then the Korean War. Having never visited Korea after he immigrated to USA in the 60’s, Mr. Pa-Yun watches documentary films and news about North Korea to keep in touch with his culture. He says he understands about 70% of Korean. His name has changed multiple times during the course of his life. Towards the end of the interview, his story overlaps with that of my multicultural/multi-ethnic family, and the effort of my father to teach Korean culture to his Spanish and American Son-in-laws.

How to eat a bar of milk chocolate
2018
Digital Video
Running time: 05:05

Installation view

2017
3-channel Digital Animation
Running time: 17:00
Dimension variable

Paradise Limited deals with the psychology of the people in a divided nation- South and North Korea. The people of Korean peninsula shared their Korean identity for about 5,000 years prior to its division. They now became estranged from each other for over 70 years. The long strip of land called the Korean Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) is one of the most heavily militarized regions in the world. The near-extinct plants and animals found their home in this artificial nature sanctuary. 

Though it looks beautiful and peaceful from far, there is an underlying sense of fear, and the real danger of stepping on the mines that were buried years ago. The constant propagandas trasmitted through the gigantic loudspeakers on both sides of the border create a strange soundscape around here. The left and the right screens show the two opposing sides, performing their identical routines.The middle screen shows the sanctuary- a mysterious feminine entity that transforms the (male) soldiers that enter the Zone into human-trees.

Excerpt from the video

2016
Digital Animation
Running Time: 10:24

Disgraceful Blue is based on a series of dreams the artist had while she lived in Frankfurt, Germany. In the work, a daughter with blue eyes is born to an Asian woman. Her family neglects the newborn for having a foreign physical feature. The woman, split between her obligation as a daughter and a mother, jumps into the sea with the baby. At this point, the perspective of the narrative shifts from the woman to the baby. The story of Disgraceful Blue depicts a journey of a heroine who is “the other” in a conforming society. She hides her otherness only to realize in the end that her inner “blueness” cannot be erased, but it is born again in another form, in the next generations.

Excerpt from the video

Music and animation by Young Joo Lee
2016
Running time: 04:47
Digital animation

Song from Sushi is an animated music video in the style of a karaoke song. The song is written from the point of view of a sushi woman, served on a sushi conveyor belt. She sings about the stereotypical depiction of Asian women as an exotic sexual object in media throughout history. She claims herself to be an illusion, a fake, which refers to the fact that the appearance reveals only one side from the whole identity of a person.

Song from Sushi – lyrics

Sushi, sushi, sushi woman
Sushi, sushi, sushi woman
Sushi, sushi, sushi woman
Yeah
I am getting cold down there
Come and get me eat me right here
I am edible just till tonight
Baby, come and eat me.
I will eat you, yeah
No expiration date time no.
No, I am just plastic sushi, baby
I am forever fresh and tasty
Tasty and fresh
Tasty flesh
Think you can roll me, roll me, wrap me,
cut me, chop me, lick me, bite me
No no
I am plastic sushi sushi
I am forever fresh and flashy
You say I am from exotic land
My pussy tastes like the eastern sea
I tell you, I am a fake
I am not from that faraway
Do you like familiarity
Do you like exoticism
I am just a fish from the sea
Just like you
We are all rotating on this planet
my price is no lower or higher than yours
we are all just another fish in the ocean
Concept without concept
can we go beyond avant-garde
can we go beyond contemporary
Birth of physical body in the sea of waves
we used to be part of the whole
nothing
The earth milk feeds us through veins
Formless we were
unconscious we were
Sound and light waves
Dancing on these strings and tunes
Consumption of the grape
opened our five senses
five beauties five tastes
O-gam O-gam
what we didn‘t sense was the loss of connection
Fertilization comes from separation
Separated from the whole, the god
or is it really

2016
casted chalk, cast resin, blackboard, contact mics, audio transducers, hair extension
Performance Duration: 45’00”

The performance deals with the history of forceful hair-cutting (the ordinance prohibiting topknots in Korean) during the Japanese colonial period (1910-1945) in Korea. The performance finds the connection between this piece of history and the hair length and style control in the modern South Korean school system.

Hair used to be considered as a spiritual symbol and a connection to the ancestors. Thus, both men and women wore long hair, and cutting the hair symbolized decapitation of pride. Colonialism devalued traditional belief systems of the colonized countries and people. Ironically, growing up in Korea, wearing a long hair has long been prohibited in middle to high school years. People argued that wearing a long hair distracts students from concentrating on their studies and that the girls will spend more time in front of mirrors if they had long hair. There were teachers standing by the entrance of schools with a ruler, measuring students’ hair length. If it was longer than 3cm, the hair would be chopped off.

Why does a system restrict the way we carry our own body? I question how the colonial history might have affected the ways people relate to their own bodies in present time.

The performer(s) have extended braid(s) that is attached to a casted chalk head. The braid is just long enough for the chalk head to touch the blackboard ground when the performers’ knees and neck are bent slightly. Performer(s) try to write the word ‘landmine’ in their own mother tongue language by dragging the chalk head.

The cast resin heads are speakers. They are connected to the blackboard, so as the performer drags the cast chalk head, the speakers vibrate. The audience can pick up and feel the vibration of the movement created by the dragging. One of the speaker-heads plays an audio clip about “hair tsunami”.

The duration of the performance reflects the normal school lecture duration of elementary to high school in South Korea.

In Search of the Lost OS is a sculpture device that I have made to film the subject in the chair from four different angles. I performed three different performances with the device, the first one was to travel the route from my workplace to home riding this sculpture, and the second one was giving a live makeup tutorial in the gallery and streaming the four different angled videos. The third one was to spend the night in the chair, and some guests were invited online to view the sleeping subject in the chair.

Modified wheelchair, CCTV cameras, projectors, artificial fur, bathrobe, mirrors, smartphone app – 2015

Weathering – 2015
Casted soap, rose essence, towels, aluminum, water, plastic

Thinking of the public bathroom soap bars prevalent in Seoul as a medium, in this installation, the casted soap hands of an elderly person were used by the visitors to be deformed and unwrinkled throughout the duration of the exhibition.
This installation was specific to the location of the art space, which was inside a run-down market hall, which was going through the process of gentrification. Many of the shop owners were elderly women and men. The visitors washed their hands using the casted soap hands which changed the form of the sculpture of an elderly person. This interactive sculpture is a commentary on an art space’s role in vitalizing local economy, but at the same time contributing to the gentrification of these locations.

Before & After

Installation View – Common Center, Seoul, South Korea

2015
Custom headphone, rope, wood, vinyl sheet, wax, water pump, plastic
Original length: 08mins 28

The short story is about a man going to a hospital to get a character surgery. The doctor introduces different types of characters that can be achieved by surgery and its side effects. He explains that erasing part of the memory of the patient is recommended to reduce the chance of side effects, and the man is put into conflict.

Catalogue
Design: Apuro studio | 디자인: 앞으로 스튜디오
Critic: Jin Joo Kim | 비평: 김진주
Short story : Young Joo Lee | 단편 소설: 이영주
<Autosave> Common Center, Seoul, Korea | <오토세이브> 커먼센터, 서울

2014
3-channel Loop animation
2D hand-drawn animation
Animation & sound by Young Joo Lee

HD video | 16:9 | length 00:11:53 | color | sound stereo
Direction / Story / Storyboard / Animation: Young Joo Lee
Music composed by Rainer Michel
sponsored by Hessische Filmförderung (Hesse Film Funding)

In a remote future or past, all human kinds have become extinct. In a secluded city live human-like robots, called the humanoids. They live eternally and they are not aware that they are man-made robots.
When the humanoids encounter death the first time, some of them decide to leave the city in search of a solution.
Far away from the city, they meet the descendants of previous human civilization in a jungle. The humanoids are mistaken as gods by the tribe because of their telepathic ability. The humanoids observe the jungle tribe to find out their secret to life.

Excerpts from the storyboard

Systematic Longing, Perfect Waiting
HD video | 16:9 | loop 09:15 | BW | sound stereo
Animation & sound by Young Joo Lee

„Any extension of ourselves is regarded as „auto-amputation“, and the auto-amputative power or strategy is resorted to by
the body when the perceptual power cannot locate or avoid the cause of irritation.“
– excerpt from Hans Selye & Adolphe Jonas‘s medical research on stress and disease

Human civilization stands on domesticating nature in favor of the needs of humankind. We live in an environment we created and make ourselves dependent on the domesticated environment. The controlled sphere is like a greenhouse made of glass. It’s breakable, thus in need of order and maintenance. I call this the disease of order. It is a self-induced disease that we have no cure for, because born into a ‘civilized’ human society, we do not know an alternative. We adapt our body and mind to survive in the artificial environment.

불특정 다수
2014
3-day performance
Video running time: 12′ 00″

Excerpt from the film

HD video | 16:9 | Running time 41:42 | color | sound stereo
Written & Directed by Young Joo Lee

The film is based on the stories and journals written about an infamous murderess Grace Marks, who was convicted at the age of 15. Grace Marks (c. 1828 – after ca. 1873) was a Canadian maid who was convicted in 1843 of murder in the death of her employer Thomas Kinnear, and was suspected of murdering his housekeeper, Nancy Montgomery. Her conviction was controversial, and sparked much debate about whether Marks was actually instrumental in the murder, or merely an unwitting accessory. The story takes place in late-Victorian era, when mysticism and superstition were challenged by scientific approach to human psychology. The video is divided into two parts. The first part takes place in the present, Grace Marks telling the story of her past to the psychiatrist. The second part is the actual story told by Grace in shadow animation. These two parts intertwine as the movie reaches its end.

Grace Marks_Valentina Knezevic
Dr. Jordan_Moritz Uebele
Dr. Dupont (Jeremiah)_Redmond Entwistle
Ms. Lydia_Kathleen Witt
Governor‘s wife_Yvonne Eichberger
The Priest_Christoph Esser
Mrs. Quennell_Beatrice Steimer
Animation_Young Joo Lee
Set design_Young Joo Lee
Editing_Young Joo Lee
Camera_Young Joo Lee
Lighting_Moritz Uebele / Bertrand Flanet
Make-up_Ellen Yeon Kim
Sound recording_Janusch Ertler / Young Joo Lee
Costume sponsored by Städtische Bühnen Frankfurt a. M.
Original Music by Rainer Michel / Young Joo Lee

2013
Excerpt from the performance
Performance duration : 60 minutes
Two pairs of pullover and running pants
Location: MMK Zollamt, Frankfurt

Excerpt from documentation

Two performers in the uniform were present without any interaction with other people for about 1 hour. Occasionally they practiced “national exercise“, originating from South Korea. South Korean government popularized this exercise since 1977. It was taught in almost every school. It coincides with the government’s effort to bring back South Korea’s economy after the Korean War.
The movements of the exercise were encoded in every student, which affect the work ethic of the adults nowadays.
I was interested in the relationship of South and North Korea, in their parallel effort in implanting the idea of diligence and healthy body – eventually to support the competition between two Koreas.

Special thanks to Kathleen Witt & Janusch Ertler

Sound recording of the sculptures

Wax, apple crate, apples, tree limb, rope, sugar
2013
4.5 x 3.5 x 2.5 m

The apple crate was balancing with the broken sculpture of a body. Theoretically, as apples rot and loses its weight, the sculpture would slowly touch the ground.

Details

2012
Digital video
Running time: 42 minutes

Starring Kathleen Witt
Filmed at Atelier Frankfurt

Special Thanks to:
Rene Schohe

Lichter Art Award Finalist 2012

2011
Styrofoam, wax, cosmetics, honey, spray paint, acrylic glass
90cm * 120cm * 28cm

2010
Digital Video
Running time: 05:56