Hye Rim Lee

BOOM BOOM: Super Heroine Super Beauty (Installation Record, Starkwhite Gallery) (2004)

6 min 27 sec (excerpt)Single channel / Digital Video / Colour / Sound

BOOM BOOM: super heroine super beauty is a large scale installation of four 3D animations. It features surround sound and is designed to be screened in a dark room.

BOOM BOOM: super heroine super beauty is a part of the ongoing TOKI/Cyborg series. It presents the process of constructing four perfect/desirable parts of the TOKI’s body. The project (re) presents and explores the domains of psychoanalysis, classicism, Asian manga/anime, cinema, music, politics, ethnology, mathematics, technology, plastic surgery, genetics, cybernetics, cultural studies, feminism, eroticism and aesthetics.

Like Botticelli's Venus, TOKI is born fully formed; an amalgam of idealisations of feminine beauty and desirability. In the case of TOKI this idealism is found in Western and Asian popular culture, animation and ancient mythology. During the long process of animation and construction, TOKI reveals herself as able to shift from being cute to classically feminine, to sexual and sensual. TOKI positions herself as both desiring and desirable subject.

"Hye Rim Lee examines the traditional male gaze which seeks erotic pleasure from the spectacle of the female body. The evolving poetics of beauty are accelerated by the pulse-like sound, which suggests erotic desire and the voyeuristic/non-participative fascination of the audience. The voice seduces and draws the viewer closer to the work... TOKI is always feminine; toy-like, sexually charged, pure-white, pretty, plastic, a giver of instant gratification and an impermeable girl-woman surrogate for both innocence and sexual solicitation. Ultimately she is a surface for the projection of fantasy; a fiction holding the promise of realisation; a cyborg machine born from the vacillating and polymorphous heart of human desire."

Other works by Hye Rim Lee

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