Hye Rim Lee

Obsession/Love Forever (2007)

11 min 27 secSingle channel / Digital Video / Colour / Sound

"Obsession/Love Forever aspires to come to terms with our contemporary vision of beauty by examining the crossover between the fashion industry’s construction of norms and contemporary myths created in cyber culture and computer gaming.

My project is a continuation of my ongoing series TOKI/Cyborg Project (2003–) which questions the role of new technologies in image making and representation.

My digital character TOKI parodies the idealisation of female form in Asian manga and anime, computer gaming and cyber culture. TOKI’s body has been cut into pieces—posing coyly to sit, move and beckon in the perfume bottle. The parts of the body become a product of beautification and commodity conflating power and seduction. The animated body parts parody the obsession with beauty created by phallic motivations in cyber culture and gaming, with the work referencing critical contributions from contemporary mythology, psychoanalysis, technology, cybernetics, aesthetics, plastic surgery, feminism, consumerism and eroticism.

Each animation not only comments on male desire and male voyeuristic fantasy, but also the female fantasy of presenting the body as a commodity. Each channel plays with and accentuates the slippery separations between dominance and desire, fantasy and fear, birth and death.

The project consists of 8 x 3D animations and an experimental soundtrack designed for a surround sound environment. Each channel features an animation sequence showing a different part of TOKI’s body reacting with particles in one of various perfume bottles.

Obsession/Love Forever is QuickTime DV PAL/NTSC format. The duration of each channel is approx 2 minutes"

—Artist's statement

Other works by Hye Rim Lee

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