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Futuro Antico. Interview with Lee Kun-Yong
25 lug 2023
Marco Bassan
The future of art and humanity can be founded on the interdependence between creation, body, and place. This concept is embodied by avant-garde artist Lee Kun-Yong, who has challenged the repression of freedom of expression.
What are your sources of inspiration in art?
The interdependence between creation and life.
Which project represents you the most? Can you tell us about its genesis?
My Bodyscape series, which includes drawings of the body and body events (performances). Human beings think, move, and exist on Earth through their bodies. Jesus, God, came to meet and communicate with humans through the same process of bodily life that we all experience. The body and physicality are the foundation of everything on this Earth.
What is the importance of the Genius Loci in your work?
The body is a concrete object and needs a place. The body cannot exist without a location. Bodies have an extraordinarily ordinary relationship with places, and it is there that the meaning of the body is born. Therefore, a body without a place cannot exist, and a place without a body has no meaning.
How important is the past for imagining and building the future?
The future signifies another place and another body. The world is also another place and bodily event. This event changes thought and attitude. Maintaining the attitudes of the past contradicts this idea.
What advice would you give to a young person who wants to follow your path?
You should be able to see the relationship between the body and the place as it is. Do not deliberately try to change, overcome, or create.
In an era defined by post-truth, does the concept of the sacred still hold importance and power?
The world has moved beyond the point where "playing dirty" was acceptable. While it may not be a definition of "sacrality," we can say that most of us know where the end of the world comes from. If the poisonous gas of civilization emitted by the human species and the disruption of the natural order do not transform into aesthetics (truth), we human beings will become extinct. This is what I sought to represent in 1978 with the intervention Snail's Gallop.
How do you imagine the future? Can you give us three ideas that you think will guide the coming years?
First, the virtual world of artificial intelligence will represent another crisis. Second, the emergence of a post-ethnic and post-national humanity will be necessary. Third, life on Earth will require interdependent physical solidarity and recovery.