2009년 9월 베를린에서 개인전을 열고 독일에서 활동하고 있는 큐레이터 몇 분을 전시장에서 만났다. 내 작업에 대해 이야기를 나누다가 자신들이 기획중인 NGBK라는 전시공간에서 열리는 그룹전 “Shared. Divided. United.”전1에 초대하고 싶다고 했다. 나는 출품작 중에서 동백림 사건에 얽힌 문화 예술가들의 이미지를 이용한 빛 설치작품을 개인전에서와는 다른 형식으로 제작하였다. 유리판 대신에 거울 위에 유리용 페인트를 이용해 인물들의 이미지를 네거티브로 그려넣고 거울 액자들은 벽면이 아닌 바닥에 불규칙적으로 배치했다. 조명이 바닥에 떨어진 네거티브 이미지의 거울액자를 비추면 전시장 벽면에는 흐릿한 포지티브 이미지가 떠올라 투영된다.
다음은 기획자가 내 작품에 대해 쓴 글.
Changwon Lee studied in Münster under Prof. Guillaume Bijl and achieved international recognition with installations that move between sculpture, photography and painting. The hallmarks of his works are their materiality and the artistic techniques they employ: Lee dissects and analyses motifs such as diffusion or inversion and at the same time makes them sensorily tangible, as they emerge and free themselves from their frame of significance. Often, he uses natural materials from everyday life such as coffee, tea-leaves or flower seeds. These are spread over narrow slats at tached horizontally to the wall and form a picture which, from a distance, seems to be a tactile painting but from close to is an assembly of evenly spread particles. His works enable intense sensory perception – not only through their ephemeral materiality but also through the interplay of light and reflection. They thus create transitional optical effects which become recognizable only when the viewer shifts his or her physical position. In the “Shared.Divided.United” exhibition, Lee is showing a current piece of work which is concerned with the “East Berlin Affair” of 1967. During the then military dictatorship under Chung Hee Park, dozens of Korean students and émigrés living in Europe were abducted to Korea and accused of spying for North Korea. Many of the kidnappings took place in West Berlin, with young artists and composers such as Eung Ro Lee and Yoon Yi Sang among the victims. Lee researched the names of the victims and presents their faces as portraits by means of mirror negati ves. Positive images are projected onto the wall via reflecting mirrors positioned on the ground. Lee thus takes up the mirror as a metaphorical language describing a reflection of the past into the present. The title “The People of the Trial”, taken from a letter written by one of the kidnapped students to a German friend who had compared his predicament with K’s trial in Franz Kafka’s novel The Trial, is a reference to the dire plight of an innocent person caught up in a dictatorial régime. (kkh)
전시명: 나눔, 분단, 통합 독일과 한국 : 냉전시대의 이민운동 (Shared. Divided. United Deutschland-Korea: Migrationsbewegungen im Kalten Krieg) | 전시장소: 베를린 신미술협회(Neue Gesellschaft für Bildende Kunst, Berlin), 쿤스트 파브릭 (Kunstfabrik e.V.) , 경비탑 (Alter Grenzwachturm der Berliner Mauer) | 전시기간 : 2009년 10월 10일 – 11월 15일 | 오프닝: 2009년 10월 9일 | 큐레이터: 이유재, 최선주, 김지은, 김금화, 유재현 | 참여작가: Duck-Hyun CHO, Kane DO, Harun FAROCKI, Kerstin KARTSCHER, Georg KLEIN, Enna KRUSE-KIM, Suntag NOH, Helena PARADA KIM, Changwon Lee, Chan-Kyong PARK, Sunmu, Florian WÜST, Jae-Hyun YOO/Farida HEUCK, msk7 ↩