 |
Hye Rim Lee
Lives and works in Auckland , New Zealand and Toronto , Canada
Powder Room and Super Toy are part of an ongoing series of the TOKI/Cyborg Project: game, pop and cyber world . TOKI/Cyborg Project: game, pop and cyber world is an on-going project that focuses on computer game design and explores the link between popular culture and new technology's role in content, production, image making and representation. The project co-opts computer graphic tools to create a dialogue about the relationship between technology, hyper-reality and female issues.
Hye Rim Lee's digital protagonist TOKI, the pretty doll-like cyborg, parodies the idealisation of the female form in Asian manga and anime and Korean pop culture. The ultra-sexy TOKI is the embodiment of fantasy, sensuality, and seduction. Lee provocatively interprets the way in which popular culture promotes the myth of transformative processes that offer the attainment of a virtual and constructed physical perfection.
TOKI stars in her own video game, which challenges boy game culture and creates new relations between images, bodies, identities and artefacts through the media in relation to girl game culture. In so doing it provokes questions about relationships between the body and technology, male and female, and inner and outer states. The artist presents an awareness of powerful gender stereotypes whilst acknowledging that eroticism and sexuality are important dimensions in life. Global western values of ideal body form, shape, and beauty are dissected in a critique that involves cybernetics, plastic surgery, aesthetics, ethics, genetics, gender power relations and identity.
This project explores the motivation, driven by mass media and advertising, that propels such a huge number of women to undertake invasive surgical procedures. Lee also questions the changing perception of Korean women's bodies, by both men and women, where beauty has become less a vanity than an actual requirement of decorum. The mirror-like screens in the powder room evoke both projection and reflection.
|
 |
Gaia Alessi & Richard Bradbury: uk
|
