Lim, Dong lak : Movement as Experiment

Lim Dong Lak

Movement as Experiment

Written by Beate Reifenscheid

                           Director in  LUDWIG MUSEUM ( in Deutschm  herrenhaus Koblenz )

Perhaps the most fascinating aspect of the sculptures created by the Korean artist Lim Dong Lak is their shining, reflecting surface: their smooth, supple form which captures everything in itself and draws in the surrounding light without thereby losing its coolness and auratic presence. These artworks thematize fundamental questions about space, with to some extent rather subtle interventions in the overall spatial situation, and they bring the viewer into a direct connection with this dynamic field. He feels himself in equal measure overwhelmed by and involved in the energetic appearance of these monumental sculptures which—mostly more than life-sized—exceed human proportions. Their size and height are deliberately used in order to assert themselves in an external space that is strongly dominated by architecture. Moving between the monumentality and dominance of the gleaming material is only the light which, at least to certain degrees, concentrates within itself the “outside” of the conditions surrounding the sculpture—such as architecture, human beings, nature, weather conditions—and thereby simultaneously achieves a visual assimilation between the interiority of the sculpture (compactness) and the exteriority of the environment (openness). Only through this merging does there arise a manifest visual fusion. It is this play of reflections which, in his numerous sculptures reduced to fundamental geometrical forms, the artist captures again and again in an almost playful manner. When he himself states, “I sculpt light and space. My working world is the commitment of my soul and the search for a middle course,” then he is emphasizing, not only the external reality and powerful impact of his works, but also the deep spiritual foundation for his artistic activity. His works are based, among other things, on the idea of dualism, which aims at a mediation between the extreme poles of perception of the world and thereby seeks a balance between such opposites as horizontal and vertical, certainty and uncertainty, fullness and emptiness, between straight and bent, as well as between light and darkness.

This leads in the case of Lim Dong Lak, alongside the universality of his formal language, to a conception of the world marked by Taoism and reflected in his definition of sculpture. Taoism has played a role for over two thousand years in the religious and philosophical culture of Asia (China, Korea, Japan). The Tao is the natural order of things, of nature and of the universe, and it lies beyond human perception: it is a part of the human being, just like human beings are a part of it, similar to the eye, which sees but cannot see itself. Since human beings are a part of this universal order, they can never fully comprehend the Tao, let alone describe it in words. Two important principles of Taoism are the principle of Yin and Yang and the principle of Wu Wei. Yin and Yang embody the principle of polarity, yet it is not a matter of apparent dualism but rather of harmonious unity or completion. Thus Lao-tzu already observes, “When everyone recognizes beauty as beautiful, ugliness already exists. When everyone recognizes goodness as good, evil already exists. Being and non-being create each other reciprocally. Heavy and light actualize each other reciprocally. Long and short differ reciprocally. Before and after follow each other reciprocally.”

Lim Dong Lak seems to include these principles of thought and structure in his formal language and quite deliberately to limit himself, in the mode of formal expression of his sculptures, to a few aspects which are accordingly all the more striking. Many of his sculptures extend in a vertical direction, just like a person who is standing upright and whose limbs are directed outward in order to develop gropingly out of themselves. The clear directional indications of the sculptural elements, just as the softness of the round shaping and their smooth surfaces, do not constitute a contradiction but instead join into a visual unity which, again and again, takes up the bipolar elements, accentuates their oppositional nature, and nevertheless causes them to merge with each other. In this respect, the sculptures induce the viewer to walk around them, to explore them through his own movement while striding through the space and registering the diverse impressions which take place in the sculpture in each case. Many of these sculptures almost recall fractal computational structures and their geometrical regularities which tend towards infinity, occur again and again, and thereby allow multiple views of the repeating elements. Alternatively, others are very hermetic, closed-off like crouching human beings, and they constitute an absolute opposite to the multiply viewed objects. Above all, however, the monumental sculpture, which resembles a permanently repeating linear loop, gives direct and clear expression to this principle of eternal self-creation: the permanent repetition here never slips into boredom, into a rapid “seeing to satiety” with regard to form, but instead it remains a living process which, above all through the light and its innumerable refractions, manipulates and recreates itself again and again in a truly marvelous manner. Exhibited in 2006 in La Defense in Paris and currently in Baden-Baden, it assimilates itself into the pre-existing architectural spatial structure and is able at the same time to dominate it. Expressed in pathetic terms, there is a union of submission and domination in one and the same figure. Sculpture thus becomes a living organism which adapts itself to the capricious moods of nature, of the architecture and even of human beings, without thereby renouncing its own identity.

Already a newspaper announcement concerning the sculptural exhibition of Lim Dong Lak in Baden-Baden stated appositely: “In his fractal theory, an individual gathers himself into totality, and totality becomes an individual. This is a high-level mathematical equation and similar to the situation as if one were to remain silent and at the same time to scream, or as if one were quite tense and simultaneously carrying out strange rhythmic movements. This engenders the vitality, connected through the repeating patterns, just like the autonomous division of cells.” Lim Dong Lak is able to conduct these oppositions—of complicated mathematics and living organism, of international language and Asian-influenced Taoism—into a symbiosis and to render them visible. He demonstrates them in pure forms, only to subsequently raise them almost to the immateriality of luminous reflections, to overcome them, and to release them into the freedom of space.

Translated from the German by George Frederick Takis

▲Point-Protopiasm

     ▲point-Protopiasm-1

The sculptures of Lim Dong Lak: From opacity to light

Marc Jimenez

Professeur d’Esthétique et Sciences de l’art

Université de Paris 1 (Panthéon-Sorbonne)

The monumental sculptures of Lim Dong Lak evoke the strange and fertile distinction put forward by the great Viennese art historian, Alois Riegl, at the beginning of the last century, between roundness and curvature seen in the organic and the abrupt and angular discipline seen in the inorganic. Could they be born of the subtle dialectic between decorative harmony and pioneering organism, creator of unseen shapes, and an incessant confrontation between tradition, the classical and the new, modernity?

Incontestably, the twenty-five works exhibited in Paris bear witness to such a polarity. They vibrate with a particular tension between rigor and fantasy, between geometry and finesse; they live from the meeting between antagonistic and complementary forces, Apollonian and Dionysian that manages to conciliate a prodigious equilibrium. Each sculpture, here, imposes itself and seduces thanks to the answer that they offer with perfect clarity to the complex history of the relationship between artistic creation and technique. They all bear witness to the mastery and the maturity of an artist who is able to metamorphose opacity into transparency and light.   

The shapes born from the integration of matter and technique occasionally run the risk of sinking into aestheticism. They  generate thus free and easy beauty, before which there is nothing to say, offered up to pure and simple contemplation. The works of Lim Dong Lak would not know how to face up to this reproach. The works, in their minimal titles, even minimalist and almost enigmatic: Deux points, Point masse, Croissance, Protoplasm, etc., do not lend themselves to any traditional register in the Fine Arts. Unclassifiable, they render the question of the relationship between art and craft, between decorative and urban environment anacronistic. The universe that they unfold are of an almost oneiric order: polished and reflecting surfaces such as mirrors, the imposing metallic masses send out staggering images of buildings and the life thereabouts, made up of anamorphic phantasmagoria. This anamorphic game and the prismatic refractions leads the spectator to the trap of their own fascination. This invites it to go around the sculpture to perceive the astonishing metamorphoses created by the interference between reality of the space where the multiple and moving images find themselves in this way refracted, as a snapshot through a keliedoscope.

The works of Lim Dong Lak  seem to have been thrown there by some mythological hero, such as Hephaestus, the Greek God of fire and metal working who is the essential elements of the cosmos incarnate, particularly fire and light. Both sculptures and architechtural monuments at the same time, conceived and minutely programmed with the help of a computer, they realise the prodigious alliance between high technology – the virtual and the digital – and one of the densest and crudest materials of heavy industry – steel. An alliance with a view to a double reconciliation which, such a promise for a appeased future, would be closer at last, by harmonious manner, man and nature, the individual and his/her surroundings

                                                                                                   October 2006

Lim, Dong lak

B. A degree of art from Dept., of Sculpture, Hongik University College of Arts

M. A degree of art from the above university.

Solo Exhibitions

1999 The 10th Solo Exhibition (invited by FOX Art Center in the United States)

2001 The 11th Solo Exhibition (invited by Insa Art Center, Seoul)

2003 The 12th Environmental Formative Art Exhibition (invited by Chosun Gallery, Seoul)

2005 The 13th Solo Exhibition (invited by Galerie Gana Beaubourg, Paris)

2006 La Defense "Exhibition Inviting Lim Dong lak" (La Defense Plaza and La Grand Arche Museum, France)

2007 An Outdoor Sculpture Exhibition invited by Baden-Baden City, Germany (Leopold Plaza, Germany)

Currently Professor at Dept., of Sculpture, Donga University College of Arts

Member of the Board for Busan Biennale

Member of the Advisory Group for Busan International Film Festival

Advisor to Korea Comtemporary Sculptors Association

Maison d´ artist (France)

Professor at Dept., of Sculpture, Donga University College of Arts