Around you hang long strips of cut-up vines made from scraps left over from the manufacture of Covid masks. As you turn a corner, you discover sculptural objects, silky paintings, metal flowers, hybrid creatures, and strange totems embedded in the fabric vegetation. You become aware of your bated breath, your emotions, the feeling of disorientation, the person ahead of you and the one behind you on the narrow path that Ok Jeong Lee leads you down.
Then the path ends, and you emerge into a bright, vast space. Hundreds of compact discs form sparkling rivers on the ground, an open and refreshing sea.
Ok Jeong Lee’s installation is a metaphor for the succession of unprecedented crises facing the world, a state of permanent disruption with no apparent end in sight. It explores the capacity of humans, as transitional beings, to evolve and face a process of transformation towards new realities, emphasizing the experience of living a situation from within rather than observing it from the outside.
In this respect, it echoes the Relational Aesthetics theorized by French art historian Nicolas Bourriaud, according to whom works of art, beyond their form or style, contribute to creating new inter-human relationships and a new sensibility.
The space she imagines for us is an invitation to sit down, reflect individually on this journey, and contemplate, in the company of other visitors, a pacified future at the end of the road.
