The New Zealand artist Hye Rim Lee's work will feature in Glassstress, an exhibition organised by the Mjellby Konstmuseum for the Collateral Events Programme of the 53rd Venice Biennale. The line up of artists includes: Louise Bourgeois, Tony Cragg, Da
Hye Rim Lee, Glassstress 2011
Palazzo Cavalli Franchetti
The New Zealand artist Hye Rim Lee's work will feature in Glassstress, an exhibition organised by the Mjellby Konstmuseum for the Collateral Events Programme of the 53rd Venice Biennale. The line up of artists includes: Louise Bourgeois, Tony Cragg, Dan Graham, Mona Hartoum, Roni Horn and Joseph Kosuth.
Hye Rim Lee’s photos and video installations tell a fantasy tale based on an intermingling of Eastern and Western popular culture and the study of new technologies and how they influence tradition. She is involved in critical exploration of questions dealing with modern visual culture from a complex point of view in which different approaches are used.
The graphics used refer to the manga tradition, but are mixed with Western aesthetic ideals, thus giving life to transgender, transcultural characters who live in an imaginary world governed by testosterone.
Through an exploration of videogame dynamics, intended for a male public, and a fascination with new technologies, the artist has used a different outlook to analyze some aspects of popular culture, globalization and especially femininity in relation to the media.
Through her numerous works she demonstrates that the exploitation of the female body is still very much a relevant question.
She was born in Korea immigrating to New Zealand in 1993 attending the Elam School of Fine Arts at the University of Auckland where she majored in Intermedia/Time based Arts. Hye Rim moved to NY in 07 debuting her work at the Armory Show with Kukje Gallery which led her to win an artist residency at ISCP NY 2007 and then a solo exhibition at Max Lang Gallery NY in 08. TVNZ commissioned a feature documentary film, TOKI Does New York, a documentary about Hye Rim Lee in 2008 that aired on Artsville, and was premiered at DOCNZ in 4 major cities in New Zealand. Her work has been exhibited widely in major solo and group exhibitions at: She now works in New York and Auckland.
The theme of this year’s exhibition is the complex relationship that ties art, design and architecture together in an age thought to have moved beyond modernism. Comparing the opinions of various curators, Glasstress addresses this issue through glass sculptures specially made by major artists on the contemporary scene and through objects and sculptures made by designers, whose research was influenced by the formal aspect of the use of the object.
Putting glassworks that respond to such profoundly different concepts next to each other in the same show is the equivalent of reviving critical issues that are far from resolved:
Glasstress 2011 offers the viewer food for thought about complex themes. It poses the need for a critical reassessment of the main tenets of modernism, the majority of which were still very much present in the art of the eighties and questioned in the next decade by the second generation of post-modernism. Glasstress 2011 demonstrates just how topical these themes still are and the need to explore them further.
