3D Artwork of Women by Soa Lee
( Soa Lee/이소아 )
While I did say recently that I wasn’t going to confine my newfound interest in Korean art only to examples actually in Korea, I confess that that was still always my preference, as I’d really like to go to some exhibitions and maybe even meet the artists for myself some day. Also, I wrote that before I checked out the “Korea” section of the startdrawing.org site again, and now that have I realise that I’ve got hours of gallery-viewing of just the Korea-based artists’ works there to do, let alone those of Koreans based overseas! And if I looked at non-Koreans’ works too? I’d be in front of the computer for weeks. Check this out for instance, which is all over the internet at the moment. For someone who knows little about the Asian art world like me, there probably isn’t a better portal site out there.
The most recent post in the Korea section is this one about 3D computer artist Soa Lee, whose work I took an immediate liking to, especially the skin tones and curves of her mostly female subjects. Normally when I write about an artist I prefer to begin the post with examples of the artist’s work rather than a picture of the artist him or herself (no matter how photogenic this particular one happens to be), but then if the following graphic gave me reservations about editing this post at work, then I can hardly inflict it unannounced on your own screens! Because of that I did consider choosing a slightly less risqué example of Soa Lee’s work to accompany this post instead, but then it proved impossible to find an example that I personally liked that was also more work-friendly, as it’s pretty representative of what she does.
( “Redyan”, 2006 )
If you like it, there are more pictures and plenty of links to galleries and interviews of Soa Lee available in Josef Lee’s original post. My own personal favorite is this nude (NSFW), but which in all seriousness I think the clothes in the lower half of the image detract from; if the image is cut off just under the navel like it is here (also NSFW), then I think the final result is far superior.
I’ll be the first to admit that at first glance her works possibly don’t appear as original and creative as others I’ve mentioned on the blog, but then those are quite subjective terms really, and for all I know about computer art she may well be quite innovative. Regardless, creative or not, I’m afraid that writing about Korean art that I simply like is going to be a regular feature of the blog from now on!
Update: Here’s another graphic that I also liked, although in this case more for the background than the woman herself. It reminds me of the realm of Oneiros in my favorite computer game Undying, which I talk about in part three of this extremely long and meandering early post of mine. Unfortunately, since I copied it from Soa Lee’s homepage last night she seems to have closed the site down.
( “Elenean Archer’s Eyesight” )
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I’m surprised you didn’t comment on the Caucasianness of so many of the characters she’s drawn. There’s one of a mermaid that seems to perfectly embody your notion of subconscious Korean adoption of Western ideals of femininity and beauty: she’s blonde, large-breasted, holding a conch like most women in Korea hold a cell phone, and reaching for an impossible pair of high-heeled shoes. (She is, after all, a mermaid.)
Your essays on the subject came to mind immediately when I saw it. It’s the second-last on this page.
It simply never occured to me to be honest. Before I published the post I was preoccupied with if the Redyan graphic was work-safe or not, and now that’s up there I’m having second thoughts about whether I should have put up the whole post at all. Of course, liking nudes or semi-nudes in an aesthetic or even erotic sense in no way whatsover detracts from my discussions of, say, Korean women’s body images, but in the real world some people interested in the latter may be put off by the former.
Hmmm…no. Having written that above paragraph, I’ve realised how so very tired I am of maintaining false dichotomies between an aesthetic gaze and a sexual male gaze when it comes virtually any representations of female subjects on this blog, and will no longer subscribe to them merely for the sake of a few readers’ sensibilities. Which reminds me, in one of her interviews Soa Lee says herself that she often meets people who have issues with her almost focus on scantily-clad female characters, but who drop their crticisms as soon as they discover she’s a woman. Like Duchamp’s urinal that became art simply because a famous artist produced it (well, in this case, merely chose it!), so too do her graphics suddenly become art and not soft-porn simply by virtue of Soa Lee’s gender.
Bit of a jump? Sorry, but I’ve had a bee under my bonnet on the subject since last year, ever since a female friend wondered how I could claim to be a feminist but (then) put up so many pictures of women in bikinis on my blog. I didn’t and still don’t see the contradiction myself, but while I won’t restart doing that, nor deliberately seek out risqué art for the sake of getting hits, I’m not going to shy away from drawing readers’ attention to when a Korean artist paints, sculpts, draws or otherwise does something unique with female (or male) nudes either. Hence, I’ll be blogging about this sometime next week, which yes, does indeed have breasts and other body parts in it, and which yes, in this case at least I like for aesthetic and sexual reasons.
Why do I write this? I don’t hear anyone complaining…sigh. Sorry, just a sounding board for myself I guess.
But…*ahem*…back to what you actually said *cough*. I don’t think that there’s too much to be said about her choice of characters: they are all Caucasian certainly, and that mermaid one does indeed embody much of what I wrote. But still, her choice is simply her personal taste, and I think that if I’d personally said what you did then people would begin to think like I sound like a broken record. For the same reason, I still have much to say (and probably always will) on the subject of women’s body images, but after 3 months or so of blogging about it, I’ll slowly but surely be moving on to new things over the next 4 weeks or so to balance it.
But having said all that, I have noticed that many graphics of people in Korea tend not to be identifiably Korean-looking, and you’ve definitely inspired me to investigate that for further posts.