Hyungkoo Lee’s ‘Animatus’ Series reveals, with striking unfamiliarity, the (il)logical skeletal structures concealed within the exaggerated gestures characteristic of famous Walt Disney and Warner Brothers characters—Mickey Mouse, Bugs Bunny, Donald Duck, Goofy, and so on—by applying human craniology to their forms. The word ‘Animatus’ derives from the Latin meaning “to breathe life into” or “to animate,” referring both to the liveliness produced by anthropomorphized animals in animation and to the taxonomic naming conventions of archaeology (such as “Homo Erectus”). In doing so, it grants these popular, contemporary icons an archaeological lineage and, most importantly, embodies a Pygmalionic desire—true to the etymology of “breathing life into”—to transform simple cartoon characters into living beings.

Pygmalion is a sculptor in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, who falls in love with Galatea, the sculpture he created that miraculously comes to life. Among the many versions of the Pygmalion myth, the play of the same name by Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) offers a particularly intriguing perspective. In Rousseau’s play, Galatea, now transformed into a human, touches her own flesh and says, “It is I (C’est moi),” then turns to nearby marble sculptures and says, “It is no longer me (Ce n’est plus moi).” Astonishingly, she points to Pygmalion, her creator, and exclaims, “Ah! It is still me (Ah! encore moi)!”¹

Galatea’s puzzling gesture—identifying the sculpture and the sculptor as the same—suggests the possibility that the sculptor’s desire to create something can be displaced into the sculpture’s desire to become something. What does sculpture desire to become? Like Galatea, who shed the hard surface of ivory to become human, sculpture always desires to become something else. And it is precisely through this impossible desire—this projection of yearning and its immediate frustration—that the paradoxical essence of all great sculpture is revealed.

What makes Hyungkoo Lee’s sculpture fascinating is that it extracts this desire for becoming from its very lack, revealing the essence of desire precisely through a certain frustration.² The Disney characters of the ‘Animatus’ Series reveal their essential desire to become human by possessing (human) bones. Yet this desire is thwarted by the objective fact that they can never become human—an outcome that is not a failure but an achievement of the work. Traversing the fantasy (“la traverse du fantasme”),³ Lee’s sculptures encounter the real, the fundamental source of their own desire.

As is well known, Disney animators endowed animals familiar to humans with human traits, adapting the distinct personality types associated with each species—clever, fussy, cute, foolish—to craft engaging, morally instructive dramas that have long been loved across generations and borders. Particularly in the United States, the homeland of Disney animation, these characters are more than cartoon protagonists. They are cherished historical legacies for a young nation, symbols of the familial values upheld by American popular culture, and ambassadors of the fantasy that America’s ideals can be harmoniously realized despite racial and linguistic diversity.

The significance of these characters for devoted Disney fans is evident in the rigorous discipline demanded of performers at theme parks like Disneyland. For instance, an actor playing Mickey Mouse must speak and behave like Mickey and is strictly prohibited from any actions that might break the illusion—smoking, going to the restroom, swearing, and so on. Children, meeting and hugging these characters, come to believe that their world is identical to the dream world inhabited by Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck.

Western audiences’ particular enthusiasm for Lee’s Animatus stems from the way his work bestows solid reality upon their fading fantasies. Every desire supplements reality. Just as Pygmalion lamented the women of Cyprus who had fallen into prostitution and sought to create for himself a pure and beautiful woman, Americans may likewise have embraced Disney’s innocent, lively characters to compensate for a dark reality corrupted by capital.

Lee, like Pygmalion adding flesh and bone to his fantasy, gives human skulls and ribcages to Disney’s flat, cartoonish bodies, turning them into living beings. Through Lee’s Lepus Animatus (2006), Bugs Bunny becomes a friend with an internal structure and real bones. The ridiculous, implausible movements of Goofy in Ridicularis (2008) become rational and convincing through their skeletal logic.

For audiences who have already grown too old for cartoons, these fantasies do not simply repeat the original format but appear instead as archaeological specimens—like fossils of extinct dinosaurs—providing an indexical assurance of absence. By demonstrating Disney’s dream of making the non-human human—an impossible yet beautiful Pygmalionic fantasy—Lee solidifies his stature as a sculptor and grants archaeological concreteness to a fading chapter of American popular culture.

Of course, this is not reality but fantasy. Yet the peculiar feature of this fantasy is that these animals deviate from their natural comportment and acquire human attributes, existing as though they were human. In other words, we do not marvel at a mouse (Mickey Mouse) but at a mouse that has become human, a mouse with human bones, the trace of a subject (the human) emerging within the body of the Other (the animal).

To understand the essence of this fascination, imagine the reverse: a human who has become a mouse, or a human body inhabited by a mind convinced it is a mouse and behaving as such. From a Freudian perspective, such a person would be a mentally disturbed individual requiring treatment—like the unhappy “Rat Man,” unable to settle within the “order of the father” and trapped in unstable traumatic images.⁴

Perhaps the true value of Animatus can be understood in relation to the difference between the human-mouse and the mouse-human—that is, the pleasure of seeing the familiar, normal subject situated within the strange body of the Other, and the discomfort of seeing the Other’s grotesque, abnormal body enact the familiar behaviors of the subject.

Animatus thus inhabits the space between these two affects. It relates to the uncanny overlap Freud called the “uncanny”—the simultaneous experience of familiarity and strangeness: the childlike wish that a cute Mickey Mouse doll might one day speak to us, and the unsettling, chilling feeling if that wish were ever realized.⁵

Accounts of visitors feeling a strange sense of unfamiliar overlap after seeing Lee’s works displayed in a Swiss natural history museum—like newly unearthed fossils of primitive animals—illustrate precisely this uncanny experience. Beneath the delightful imagination and skilled sculptural finish of Animatus lies a subtle code concerning the contradictory desires of the subject revealed through the body of the Other.

The Pygmalion myth leaves two contradictory effects: one is the positive belief that earnest desire will be fulfilled, and the other is the perverse, negative belief in indulging fantasies detached from reality. How does Animatus appear to us? For some, it affirms the human charm of these characters; for others, it may seem like the impure invasion of humanity that corrupts the characters’ animal innocence.

Regardless of interpretation, the faint overlap between subject and Other that Animatus produces summarizes the yearning that lies between sculpture and reality, human and non-human, lack and supplement within Lee’s practice. Sculptures that want to be human yet can never be human; the Pygmalionic desire fulfilled “only by traversing the fantasy”; Animatus by Hyungkoo Lee leaves an unfamiliar index of sculpture’s contradictory longing by desiring what can never be desired.⁶


 
¹ Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Pygmalion, London: printed for J. Kearby, No. 2, Stafford-Street, Old Bond-Street; Fielding and Walker, Paternoster-Row; and Richardson and Urquhart, Royal Exchange, 1779, pp. 31–33.
² This perspective is even more clearly expressed in the prosthetics from Lee’s early The Objectuals Series. For further discussion, see: Jongchul Choi, “What Does Sculpture Want? The Posthuman Myth in Hyungkoo Lee’s Sculpture,” in 《Korean Contemporary Artist Highlights IV – Hyungkoo Lee》, Busan Museum of Art, 2022.
³ Refer to Jacques Lacan, “In You More Than You,” in The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis – The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book XI, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan, New York: Norton, 1998, pp. 273–274.
⁴ Sigmund Freud, “The Rat Man,” in The Freud Complete Works 11, trans. Kim Myunghee, Seoul: Open Books, 1996.
⁵ Sigmund Freud, “The Uncanny,” in The Freud Complete Works 14, trans. Kim Myunghee, Seoul: Open Books, 1996.
⁶ This essay is an adapted version of a text originally published in the catalogue of Hyungkoo Lee’s solo exhibition at the Busan Museum of Art (March 29 – August 7, 2022).

References

• [비평] '아니마투스Animatus' : 이형구의 피그말리온적 열망
  [Critique] 'Animatus' : Hyungkoo Lee’s Pygmalionic Desire