Taxidermy the Joy

Saemi Cho Comics Yunsung Lee reinterprets the tangled relationship between contemporary visual culture and the material world through the art form of comics. Quick to absorb the influence of the Japanese manga he grew up with, he has long taken as his motif the interplay between the Western classical tradition and the eroticism of moe (萌え).1) An artist who has explored the phenomena of visual culture by adding the comic imagination to mythic narrative, Lee turns in his 2024 solo exhibition to an in-depth investigation of the comics form itself, with particular attention to the interaction between word and image. What, then, are comics? Scott McCloud (b. 1960), author of *Understanding Comics*, defines them as "juxtaposed pictorial and other images in deliberate sequence, intended to convey information and/or to produce an aesthetic response in the viewer."2) Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980), author of *Understanding Media*, described comics as a form that is "low in information but high in participation, (…) requiring completion or supplementation by the reader,"3) and as belonging to "the world of games, that is, the model of a situation, and the world that extends from that situation."4) Seen as a history of form, William Hogarth (1697–1764) led the way in satirical prints, and Rodolphe Töpffer (1799–1846) established the prototype of the comic strip. The terms bande dessinée in Europe, comic book in the United States, manga (漫画・マンガ) in Japan and webtoon in Korea mark the medium's divergence across time and region.5) If the medium's tangled development can be simplified at all, it divides into the American comics that began with Walt Disney in the 1930s and the Japanese manga that grew under their influence from the 1960s on. Japanese manga in turn is divided by generation: a first generation, born around the 1960s, who watched *Space Battleship Yamato* (宇宙戦艦ヤマト) and *Mobile Suit Gundam* (機動戦士ガンダム) as teenagers; a second, born around the 1970s; and a third, born around the 1980s, who encountered *Neon Genesis Evangelion* (新世紀エヴァンゲリオン) in adolescence.6) Laocoön Born in 1985, Yunsung Lee experienced the full force of manga culture while growing up, and because he came of age alongside internet culture, questions of media format, distribution channel and mode of expression surface directly in his work. Beyond painting, he has experimented with 3D-printed sculpture and NFT art, formal explorations that are themselves a response to the shifting media environment. In the *Laocoon* series, as in the earlier *Torso*, *Danae* and *Zodiac* series, Lee borrows a motif from Greek and Roman mythology: the story of despair and agony in which Laocoön, priest and seer of Troy, incurs the wrath of the gods and is attacked by sea serpents and killed together with his two sons. The Roman poet Virgil (Publius Vergilius Maro, 70–19 BC) describes the moment of his death in the *Aeneid*: The serpents made straight for Laocoön. First each snake wound itself around the small bodies of his two sons and fed on their pitiful limbs; then, as he came with weapons to their aid, they seized him and bound him in their huge coils. Twice they wrapped his waist and twice his neck in their scaly backs, and reared their heads and necks high above him. He strained with both hands to tear the coils apart, his fillets fouled with black venom, and he raised to the heavens a terrible cry, like the bellowing of a wounded bull that has fled the altar and shaken from its neck the ill-aimed axe.7) No subject in the history of art has been as contested as Laocoön. In eighteenth-century Germany a debate arose around the *Laocoön Group* (Laokoongruppe), the quintessence of Hellenistic sculpture. The art historian Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717–1768) held it up as the archetype of ancient Greek beauty, as if Laocoön represented a human being enduring the most extreme suffering: an exemplary case of "noble simplicity and quiet grandeur" (edle Einfalt und stille Größe) that keeps its composure in the midst of raging passion. Where Winckelmann rediscovered the value of ancient Greek sculpture and left outstanding writings on plastic beauty, the playwright and critic Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729–1781), in his essay *Laocoön, or On the Limits of Painting and Poetry* (Laokoon oder über die Grenzen der Malerei und Poesie), set out to define the essence of literature and of the plastic arts and to distinguish the two media. Lessing formulated literature as the representation of action (time) and the plastic arts as the representation of form (space), thereby asserting the superiority of literature, which can account for what comes before and after, over the plastic arts, which can show only a frozen instant.8) The American critic Clement Greenberg (1909–1994), in "Towards a Newer Laocoon" (1940), traced the genealogy of modernism and made the historical case for abstract art.9) Art, he argued, develops on the basis of the essential properties of its medium, and he stressed the importance, in painting, of "the ineluctable flatness of the stretched canvas."10) Historically, the debates conducted under the name of Laocoön were all meant to speak of new form. They developed by reinforcing formalism, and they decided the direction of twentieth-century art. With *Laocoon*, Yunsung Lee analyses the form of comics, a medium subject to the mutual interference of literature and the plastic arts, and moves toward a conceptually complete body of work. He first made a work on the Laocoön narrative in 2011. It shares with the works of 2023 and 2024 the switching of the figures' gender from male to female. But the 2011 work is dazzling and slick. It was produced digitally, and it exists as digital data and as a print. The three characters are arranged on a single surface, in the way the sculptural group, carved by removing unneeded stone from a single block of marble, is physically one object. The group was excavated with all three figures' right arms missing, and the artist drew the missing parts just as they are. The twisted orientation and posture of the bodies, the feet and legs, are also rendered as in the statue. The difference is that the sculpture is subject to gravity, whereas the painting seems to float in mid-air, or to be drawn from a bird's-eye view looking down from above.11) At least seven gaudy, enormous serpents are entangled with the characters against a background of spurting blood, and the writhing upper and lower bodies, struggling under the pressure of suffocation, and the contorted faces look excessively unreal. Capturing the decisive moment of a cruel, blood-soaked struggle, the work also recalls the ukiyo-e (浮世絵) of Hokusai (葛飾北斎, ca. 1760–1849) and tentacle-horror manga such as Toshio Maeda's (前田俊夫) *Urotsukidōji* (うろつき童子). The 2024 *Laocoon*, by contrast, is achromatic. The artist handles his moe characters as carefully as if they were marble torsos from the Greek period. Lee places three characters, whose relationship is hard to make out, independently on canvases of their own: a woman who looks mature, and two who look younger than she. The gaze of these characters has changed over time. In the 2011 work the characters' eyes are closed; in the 2023 work they faithfully follow the gaze of the sculptural group; in the 2024 work they look at the viewer. The characters meet the viewer's eyes, offer words and thoughts, and manifest a will to interact and to share time. Déformation and the Expression of Emotion What has the artist done to raise the appeal of his characters? He has deliberately distorted the body: breasts that are far too large, a waist that is slender by comparison. Distorted bodies emphasise the expression of emotion and release the character's feelings more dynamically. Déformation (from the French déformer), a term for the exaggerated alteration of a subject in art, developed in a specialised way in comics. Comics are, in effect, a system of déformation; to understand comics is to understand the grammar of déformation.12) In reality the body can be altered by dieting, exercise or surgery, but comics and the virtual arts rely on déformation. Can emotion be made visible? The capacity of a drawing to provoke emotional responses such as anger, joy, tension, madness or anxiety is one of the virtues of comics, as is the fact that merely giving direction to a line within the frame can express dynamism, infinity or savagery. Comics have agreed-upon conventions for expressing emotion: a cross-shaped bulging vein for anger, a drop of sweat for nervousness, vertical lines on the forehead for dejection or despair. The diagonal strokes on both cheeks of the *Laocoon* characters are the comic notation for a face flushed with excitement or rage. Through the shifting of the characters' gaze and dense comic expressions of emotion, the artist has heightened their appeal. Comics are the form of expression with the greatest density of emotion, which is why exaggerated expressions of feeling are called "cartoonish."13) Speech Balloons and the Gutter The speech balloon is one of the formal foundations of comics. It was revolutionary because it shifted the story from being read to being heard, from sight to hearing.14) A sense of sound remains in *Laocoon* (2023–24). But because the artist has omitted the "speech" inside the balloons, the sound has hidden itself in a vacuum. Perceiving sound takes time. In the world of comics, time and space are one; the time of comics is always now, and only the panel one is looking at is held in the present. A speech balloon cannot be larger than the picture, so its size is necessarily limited. Its basic shape is determined by how the figure and the speech interact. Japanese manga is more dynamic than the comics of other cultures because Japanese is written vertically, and a tall panel makes a more dynamic image than a wide one.15) The artist has also rendered the sea serpents flat. Their tails resemble the tails of speech balloons, raising the possibility that the background itself is a speech balloon. This formal resemblance of the tails suggests that what inflicts pain on these girls may be darkness, or despair. The gutter, too, is at the heart of comics. The gutter turns two separate scenes into a single idea.16) The panels of comics divide both time and space. By applying the formal element of comics that reads as a "gutter," the artist can introduce into a single picture a structural device that implies the continuity of time rather than a frozen instant. These lines take on no concrete function such as a jump in time, a move from action to action, from subject to subject or from scene to scene; they resemble, rather, the cinematic editing of short-form video. Drawing on the theory that in comics space does the work that time does in film,17) the artist has made his effort to understand the time of comics visible as a division of space. By deliberately dividing the picture according to the formulas of comics, he expresses time and space; and through this comic variation he also reinterprets perspective in its classical sense, showing aerial perspective through the speech balloons and linear perspective through the gutters within a single picture. If the working of time must be expressed visually in an art from which time is absent, what method can be adopted? If time is expressed through speech balloons, gutters and multiple viewpoints, the time a character stays within the picture can be extended. Like Paul Cézanne (1839–1906) in his multi-viewpoint still lifes, the artist confirms the impossibility of reproducing physical conditions, and mixes several viewpoints on a single surface. Flatness, Materiality, and the Frame of the Canvas *Laocoon* (2023–24) began as drawings on an iPad. Lee's digital sketches, born as digital data specified in coordinates and vector values, are akin to the blueprints that painters once drew in watercolour or pencil before taking up oils on canvas. But once the painting stage begins, the artist deliberately sets contemporary technology aside and completes the work through a labour-intensive process, from the priming of the canvas to the smallest details of the surface. Digital by birth, his work hopes to exist as a thing. The image he has so painstakingly painted on canvas has secured, through the binding of pigment, a material foundation on which to lead a new life.18) Even in the self-evident reality in which digitalisation de-materialises the world by turning it into information,19) the artist's images show that they exist by being materially attached to the material foundation of the canvas. Yunsung Lee paints in order to hold the feeling of joy fast to the canvas. Joy as a feeling distinct from happiness: something that arises and subsides unpredictably, that can reappear even in the midst of danger and difficulty, fluid and uncontrollable by nature,20) the driving force of life. "I try to express an eternal climax and catharsis that keeps gushing out, without end."21) The artist has concentrated on a visual-perceptual investigation of the form and workings of the emotion called joy, and has found his methodology in comics. By placing the core elements of comics, speech balloons and gutters, on the picture plane, he has expanded the time and space of the canvas in the manner of comics; and by turning the characters' gaze toward the viewer he has also generated the experience of "subjective motion" that raises their appeal.22) In the digital age, comics have moved their living environment from paper to the screen. Digital comics platforms have broken down the constraints of borders and time. Anyone can now use AI generation to produce not only images but video with ease, and the AI anime character is among the most popular things that generative AI is asked to make. Artificial intelligence computes. Information proliferates, and we are asked to examine the legitimacy of AI-generated art as a new art form. But Yunsung Lee's work is not about technology. Whereas the digital image, by eliminating the reality it refers to, manufactures a new reality that does not exist,23) Lee's work is a process of effort to prove the existence of what exists. 1) "Moe," a coinage of otaku (オタク) culture, is slang for an attachment close to love directed at girl characters in manga, anime and games. Commonly accepted moe elements include cat ears, maid costumes, antenna-like tufts of hair and déformation. "Otaku," the name of a subcultural group first used in 1983 by Akio Nakamori (中森明夫, b. 1960), denotes a person excessively absorbed in and obsessed with manga, anime and the like. Hiroki Azuma, *Otaku: Japan's Database Animals*, trans. Eunmi Lee (Seoul: Munhakdongne, 2001), pp. 84–86. 2) Scott McCloud, *Understanding Comics*, trans. Nakho Kim (Seoul: Biz&Biz, 2020), p. 28. 3) Marshall McLuhan, *Understanding Media*, trans. Jeonggyu Park (Seoul: Communication Books, 2007), p. 188. 4) Marshall McLuhan, *Understanding Media*, trans. Jeonggyu Park (Seoul: Communication Books, 2007), p. 194. 5) Seokhwan Park, "Webtoons Surveying Korea's Modern and Contemporary History, and Their Meaning," *Art View*, vol. 152 (Seongnam Cultural Foundation, Aug.–Sept. 2020), p. 14. 6) Where the first generation hoped for science-fiction imagination and grand narrative, the third generation's interests centre on mystery and games. 7) Virgil, *Aeneid*, trans. Byunghee Chun (Seoul: Soop, 2007). 8) In contemporary aesthetics this debate has converged on the question of the interrelation of media. Hyunju Yoo, "On the Recognition of the Boundaries of Art: Lessing's *Laocoön* and Intermediality," *Brecht and Contemporary Theatre* 40 (2019), pp. 281–298. 9) "Towards a Newer Laocoon," *Partisan Review* (July–August 1940); Clement Greenberg, *The Collected Essays and Criticism*, vol. 1, pp. 23–38. Korean edition: Clement Greenberg, *Art and Culture*, trans. Juyeon Cho (Busan: Kyungsung University Press, 2004), pp. 325–343. 10) Clement Greenberg, *Art and Culture*, trans. Juyeon Cho (Busan: Kyungsung University Press, 2004), p. 340. 11) Cf. Hong Se-seop (1832–1884), *Swimming Ducks* (游鴨圖). https://encykorea.aks.ac.kr/Article/E0064189 12) Disney, for example, has a déformation peculiar to Disney, and Osamu Tezuka (手塚治虫, 1928–1989) one peculiar to Tezuka. When we look at a work we tacitly accept the context of its déformation, and so understand precisely what is drawn there. Tamaki Saitō, *Psychoanalysis of the Character*, trans. Jeongmin Lee (Seoul: Editus, 2021), p. 72. 13) Tamaki Saitō, *Psychoanalysis of the Character*, trans. Jeongmin Lee (Seoul: Editus, 2021), p. 96. 14) The speech balloon first appears in art in medieval religious painting. In *The Annunciation to Saint Anne* (ca. 1505–10) by the German painter Bernhard Strigel (1461–1528), a scroll bearing writing issues from the angel's mouth. 15) In contemporary comics the basic shapes of the speech balloon fall into three types: the plain balloon, the cloud balloon and the burst balloon. The plain balloon usually carries ordinary dialogue, the cloud balloon a monologue, and the burst balloon a loud sound. The plain balloon is further divided into the rectangle and the oval; Western comics prefer the rectangle, East Asian comics the oval, the Western preference owing to the greater volume of dialogue. Inha Park, "The Magic of the Speech Balloon," *Hankyoreh 21*, https://h21.hani.co.kr/arti/COLUMN/153/31942.html, 3 May 2012 (accessed 18 February 2024). 16) Scott McCloud, *Understanding Comics*, trans. Nakho Kim (Seoul: Biz&Biz, 2020), p. 74. 17) Scott McCloud, *Understanding Comics*, trans. Nakho Kim (Seoul: Biz&Biz, 2020), p. 15. 18) W. J. T. Mitchell, *What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images*, trans. Jeonyugyeong Kim (Seoul: Greenbee, 2010), pp. 52–53. 19) Byung-Chul Han, *Non-things*, trans. Daeho Jeon (Seoul: Gimm-Young, 2022), p. 10. 20) Rebecca Solnit, *Orwell's Roses*, trans. Aeri Choi (Seoul: Banbi, 2021), pp. 139–140. 21) Yunsung Lee, *NU* (2015), p. 41. The critic Geunjun Lim described it as "the rapture common to the moments of life and death, that is, a great joy exceeding finite desire." Geunjun Lim aka Jungwoo Lee, "A Critical Note on the Paintings of Yunsung Lee," in Yunsung Lee, *NU* (2015), p. 17. 22) Motion lines indicate the path of an object moving through space. They developed into a way of expressing speed with lines in the background, and later, on the assumption that watching a moving object is absorbing, into the technique of "subjective motion," in which the viewer becomes the moving object itself. Scott McCloud, *Understanding Comics*, trans. Nakho Kim (Seoul: Biz&Biz, 2020), p. 122. 23) Byung-Chul Han, *Infocracy*, trans. Daeho Jeon (Seoul: Gimm-Young, 2023), p. 90.