Lee Kit
In his installations, video and audio recordings, and mixed-media works, Lee Kit focuses with quiet intensity on the condition of being human. In his words: “I am interested in human experience and emotions, be it private, public, personal or collective.”
His solo exhibition "We Used to Be More Sensitive" was presented at Hara Museum in Tokyo where he incorporated the use of light, shadow, moving images and everyday items together to create a series of site-specific installations, in which a sense of “time has stopped” permeated. Lee Kit also both use the sunlight outside the exhibition space and the light from projectors in contrast of something real and artificial and let that atmosphere be a one-off experience. Viewers could easily have observed that the illumination of the objects is dependent on time. Perhaps he was questioning a certain kind of uncertainty and insecurity caused by all the temporal and easy-shifting situation under contemporary society, which resonates to each person living in the modern world. So, that is why the concept of “time” becomes very important and can be reflected through those ordinary items in daily life. Like he states, “most people project moods onto objects” because the artist and viewers have personal experience associated with daily objects and memories can be recalled by them, so the moods, feelings, and the phenomenological perception happen. “Objects are not a memento…These things are a part of you.” Lee Kit said so.
Installation at the Hara Museum, photo by Shigeo Muto Lee Kit, courtesy the artist and ShugoArts
Exhibition view: Lee Kit 'We used to be more sensitive.', Hara Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo ( 2018)
Lee Kit, hand-painted cloth used to clean window, 2008, S.M.A.K. Collection.
Lee Kit, Self Portrait at the Lombard-Freid Gallery in New York 2014
They have more or less effect on us, not physically but consciously or emotionally. We use them, and then feel, perceive and remember them, like there is a storage in those objects that store a part of our phenomenological experience containing our feelings and perception. So in my art practice, I collect them as collecting my feelings and perception. They will turn into an archive of the phenomenological experience of time when I recollect and arrange them in front of a plain background like a recalling from memory. Somehow those objects can also depict the person who you are. In this process, I believe, it can be acknowledged that time can be documented in feelings and emotions from individuals.
He depicts a certain kind of poetics reflected on daily life and items which refer to the normal domestic living surroundings in modern society. I think this is like the way when we stay in a trance as if an act of escaping from the life track we should be on. Objects are a form of mediation provides a space that viewers can feel time and memory. As if this is a space that people can stay sentimental and have a daydream.
James Turell - Skyspace
James Turell's work is featured by a form of simplicity and the embodied on-site experience as well as interaction with light. One of his Skyspaces’ series, Seldom Seen is permanently installed in a specifically designed chamber at Houghton Hall & Gardens Norfolk. The main body of this piece of work is a square aperture with no glass in the ceiling open to the sky, where people who walk in and look upon can see the changes of the colour of natural light, the movements of sunrise or sunset, and clouds gently floating in the sky.
James Turell Skyspace, Seldom Seen, 2002 Houghton Hall & Garden
James Turell Skyspace, Seldom Seen, 2002 Houghton Hall & Garden
At that moment, Time becomes a very tangible subject in relation to human person’s sensation, you would feel like your body is relatively static, so you would more notice those very slight movements around you. in this experience orchestrated by James Turell, I can see that people tend to use their vision to locate themselves, so if time becomes visible or a form of physical presence, I can be aware that I am experiencing and perceiving it, as Turell states “…you are actually looking at yourself perceiving”, this somehow could give me a sense of contingent connection with those beautiful scenes, it makes me feel on that occasion my conscious feelings are connected with the light, clouds, and nature, as well as time itself. By this perception, time is being stretched. Perhaps time is not a thing or a world that we have around us but more something that we perceive, create and make.
Darron Almond - Fullmoons
Darren Almond’s long-exposure moonlight photos play explicitly with that idea, giving a subtly and intriguingly different image to the ones to which we are used. The sea becomes a cloud of probabilities, double-imaged leaves present a record of their fluttering in some midnight breeze.
One can feel time passing in these photographs, perhaps thanks to an awareness of the machine producing the image, or a subtle change in light from the moon’s progression in the sky. It’s interesting to become conscious of the mechanism of the eye, to consider the paths of light beams through that internal chamber that tell us about movement and form.
Full Moon Bow 2011 C print 121 × 121 cm(unframed) © Darren Almond
Full Moon Parana Plateau 2012 C print 121 × 121 cm(unframed) © Darren Almond
Full Moon Iguazu River 2012 C print 121 × 121 cm(unframed) © Darren Almond
From my point of view, Landscape is a form of geological, cosmological time which can be seen as an exterior environment compared to the surroundings Lee Kit presented in his work - a domestic room or a space reflecting on individual perceptual sense. Similarly, we can see the embodiment of phenomenology in landscapes. The images seem to become something that can flow, it could be a beam of light, a gentle breeze or a milky waterfall. From those imaginations about time, time is thin and flexible. Time is full of voids, imaginations and possibilities, like a blank invisible paper or canvas. It floats and shifts flexibly depending on the individual sensation of time, like Darren Almond argues that “deal with an extension of time compressed into one frame”. The “frame” could be a series of long exposure photography, a drawing, or something refer to human flesh or mind. Our mental activities are like brush under the control of our awareness, therefore, our memory could be a particular inside landscape from our first version, a conscious drawing we create at that time. I believe this is a certain participation in time through embodied phenomenal engagement with an outer landscape or the environment around us.
Human since 1982
Humans since 1982 are known for their kinetic sculptures and installations. Within their practice formed by digital installation of clocks, video and light. they seem to have an interest in the exploration about the motion or progressing of time. As these waterfalls are digitally simulated by computers, the appearance of them is very similar to the natural one, but the loop of motion between an act of starting and stopping the flow is not the sense that people can witness in nature. Therefore, I can see a kind of phenomenal embodiment of time in this piece of work, which seems to be a dream-like impression of waterfalls we had in our mind after we saw a real one.
Humans Since 1982 Collection of Motion: Waterfalls (Tiered) 2019 90 x 123 x 12 com
Humans Since 1982 A Million Times at Changi, 2018 Changi Airport Singapore, Terminal 2. Mediums: Corian, steel, aluminium, electrical components, stepper motors, customised software, projector, speakers. Size:7.5 x 3.4 m
Humans since 1982 were internationally known for their A Million Times Project, the most famous of which is the one installed at Changi Airport Singapore. Whit a series of poetic kinetics of 504 clock-faces in designed programming, where the hour and minute hands keep spinning all the time while continue reporting real time as a functional clock, the artists attempt to present an abstract concept about time and then visualise an intuitive imagination about this contemplation.
In this work, the clock can be not only regarded as just a tool of measurement with which we measure time. “The measurable side of the world is not the world, it is the measurable side of the world,” said Martin Seel. From my perspective, time is not only an object that we use to measure a certain span of a period. It could be a form of subjective consciousness that can spin and shape into a surprising pattern. As the artists state, "we liberated the clock from its sole function of measuring and reporting the time by taking the clock-hands out of their “administrative” roles and turning them into dancers."
Lee Ufan - Voids and infinity of time within a space of the painted and unpainted
Lee Ufan's art has a specific sense of metaphysically poetic beauty. His paintings are characterised by a pattern of a contrast between the painted and unpainted. From a heavy stoke of the beginning of a line or point to the gradually faded end, there is a certain kind of tension within the progressing of his painting. I can see a space of the outer and a space of the inner where the concept of "infinity of time" he brought up in his artistic practice.
Lee Ufan From Line 1976 Oil and pigment on canvas 80.5 x 100 cm
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Lee Ufan From Point 1979 Oil and pigment on canvas 161.9 x 130.2 cm
Lee Ufan was trying to find this kind of infinity through employing a form of repetition in his paintings, where he imitates an abstract form of time that can be sensed in daily repetition. From my point of view, in his painting, through understanding the relationship or interaction between painted and unpainted parts of a painting, audiences can experience a certain kind of infinity permeated from the outside world. Because time embodies a similar characteristic “repeated” to the “painted parts” of a panting. So the repetition can be noticeable and acknowledged, while a sense of infinity is coming from the “unpainted part”, which refers to the inside perception of it. Also, through “a world in motion,” the infinity of time can be revealed from the outside world. In my opinion, within a possibility of infinity and a space of imagination, there is a certain kind of aesthetic of poetry being reflected beyond an abstract externality of the space and the seemingly meaningless repetition of motion. That is how language becomes so pale and lost in imagination. I believe that sensation cannot be told by words. Because if it can be told, then the act of sense would no longer only exist in perception. As resonant to Tao Yuanming’s poetry, revealing a traditional feature of the oriental poetry, “in these things there lies a deep meaning; Yet when we would express it, words suddenly fail us”, I believe that it is also a certain kind of aesthetic of poetry concerning how people feel time, through a means of visual arts, people can feel more than the artwork itself. In the space of this kind of poetic stillness and emptiness of time, the everlasting infinity can be somehow captured in the world around us.
Henri Bergson - Time and Free Will and Maurice Merleau-Ponty - Phenomenology of Perception
In Time and Free Will, Henri Bergson argues that time is a psychologically abstract concept dependent on humans’ consciousness. By imposing spatial constructs such as temporal coordinates, he contended that time itself then becomes a distortion of the real thing: ‘[…] the idea of a homogenised measurable time is shown to be an artificial concept, formed by the intrusion of the idea of space into the realm of pure duration.’ Attempting to measure time by counting separate fixed moments disrupts the experience of the passage of time, which has a durational quality and is a permeation of past, present and future.
Bergson was one of the first to give philosophical expression to the concept of moving images and cinema. If we regard time as a series of discrete spatial measurements, what we may think we are seeing as a continuous flow of movement is, in fact, a succession of fixed frames or still images.
Henri Bergson. (2018) Time and Free Will (Cosimo Classics Philosophy).
Maurice Merleau-Ponty. (2013) Phenomenology of Perception
Following Husserl's base of phenomenology, Merleau-Ponty attempts to reveal the phenomenological structure of perception dealing with a wide range of an account of space, time and the world as people experience them. To acknowledge the consciousness and sensation, Merleau-Ponty's account of the body helps him undermine what had been a long-standing conception of consciousness, which hinges on the distinction between the for-itself (subject) and in-itself (object).
As Maurice Merleau-Ponty suggests, “My present, which is my point of view upon time, my duration becomes a reflection or an abstract appearance of universal time,” I argue that human’s presence and duration can be regarded as a form of time, in which every single moment, a person is experiencing and perceiving it. Embedded in universal time, perhaps there are various forms of human time. I believe human time is concerned with how human body resides in time and also refers to the way how human anticipate in time.
Reference:
Lee Kit (2018) Exhibition 'We used to be more sensitive.', Hara Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo
Lee Kit (2016) Exhibition. Walker Art Center. Lee Kit “Hold Your Breath Dance Slowly”
Darren Almond (2014) Fullmoon Publisher: TASCHEN Gmbh
Merleau-Ponty, M. (2013) Phenomenology of Perception. Publisher: Routledge Kindle Edition.
Bergson, H. (2018) Time and Free Will (Cosimo Classics Philosophy). Musaicum Books. Kindle Edition
White Cube Gallery. (2020) About Time. Online Exhibition. Available from: https://whitecube.viewingrooms.com/viewing-room/21-about-time/ [Accessed 22 July 2020]
Groom, A. (editor) (2013) Time in Documents of Contemporary Art. Cambridge: Whitechapel Gallery and Massachusetts: The MIT Press