《Cowboy》(Artspace Boan3, Jul. 28–Aug. 20, 2023) is Eusung Lee’s third solo exhibition and the result of expanding her artistic practice into an inquiry into the symbols and forms of the human body. For this exhibition, the artist cast the bodies of actual people using plaster bandages as the primary material, then cut, sutured, and reassembled the molds into five standing figures.

She also presented one sculpture consisting of aluminum fragments self-casted from parts of her own body, re-combined in an incomplete manner and laid across the floor. Looking back at the dominant image of objects in her earlier works—although she has occasionally explored bodily movements or the corporeality of objects in group exhibitions[1]—the attempt to reveal the shape of the actual human body so completely, and moreover to realize the entire body, marks an unusual direction.

Those already familiar with Lee’s work may experience these human forms as a kind of betrayal. But the betrayal is merely an illusion. The artist always claims the right to act freely within the radius of her practice (a right that also operates within the concept of humanity), and moreover, the “cowboy” she deliberately chose as the title of the exhibition readily plays with the very notion of betrayal.

To resemble the human is therefore always intriguing—even now, in a post-human, AI-driven era. The symbolization of the human is a mechanism of typification, but it also disrupts its attributes. The archetypal image of the cowboy[2] has long guided the myth of the pioneer, based on the upright masculinity of the human body and its active physical prowess. Yet this pioneer does not produce familial authority like the patriarch.

Like the shepherd of old,[3] he protects the town, but he is usually depicted as an outsider drifting through the desert wind like a grain of sand, unable to fully blend into the group. We have often seen, especially in film, how this loneliness shifts into queerness. And now, even this deviation has itself become a type,[4] extending into the phenomenon of calling middle-aged actors “babygirl.”[5]

But does the term “cowboy,” when used to describe a sculptor, carry the same meaning?[6] After all, the cowboy is a liminal figure who guides the herd just enough to prevent its collapse, a sentinel who does not restrain, or a wanderer who nevertheless has power (and whose opposing characteristics can operate in reverse). In this exhibition, too—like the hollow gap left after excavating the hidden value of accumulated cultural history—the cowboy performs such an archetypal role.

Although intentionally unrelated to any single work, it weaves together the coexistence of the figures within the exhibition. If we follow the logic consistent with the artist’s practice—which has always placed “betrayal” at its core by dividing and re-attaching objects, splitting the stable gaze of the object, and allowing external structures to pierce the flesh—then the betrayal applied to a single artwork-object is now expanded into a category that penetrates the entire exhibition through the figure of the “cowboy.”

Since the cowboy suggests a stance of confrontation, if we assume that the target of such opposition exists in this exhibition, it must be the “shell.” The five bodily shells—mostly white, occasionally coated with watercolor yet disappearing into the granular whiteness (or conversely, absorbed into the grid-like surface), perforated without filling every hole, inverted between inside and outside, front and back, hollow yet standing upright, some supported only by a thin wire armature—face the viewer.

One imagines the process the artist undertook to cast these shells. The material must adhere closely to a living body whose muscles shift and pores exude moisture. This bodily image—the shell—evokes tactility. It is not skin as an object, yet inevitably summons the image of skin. Skin “binds the body, enables the human to stand upright, protects against external assault, and receives and transmits information,”[8] and has been theorized in psychoanalysis as a mechanism of ego formation, conceptualized as the “wrapper” by Didier Anzieu. Yet Lee’s bodies are neither skin nor wrapper. They are simply “shells” missing the ego they might have protected.

If there is an analogy—although they have no relation to the “digital flesh”—these standard-shaped bodies resemble “the world as wound,” which opens “portals and passages.”[9] As material and sculptural language, the shell recalls the protective function of the wrapper and biological repair, yet ruptures them.

What remains on the shell is the trace of nonverbal contact that once existed on the boundary between hole and surface—skin. The artist’s hand must have repeatedly tapped, pressed, and wrapped another person’s flesh. Plaster bandage dries quickly and can be crushed easily; the act of wrapping the body would have alternated between haste and suspension at every bump and strand of hair. The moment when the living body was gently enclosed eventually leaves only the shell, the body slipping out entirely. The remaining “shell” becomes the trace of a collapsed, absent body—a form that remains like the possibility of a body becoming a performance-less ritual text, the pursuit of its sculptural potential.

The shell evokes the thought of the body as ghost. The artist never mentions “ghosts”—this is solely the viewer’s projection—but the white body automatically recalls the wax tablet that Giorgio Agamben describes (citing Plato and Aristotle) as a material that retains a trace even after removal, a surface into which memory can be inscribed.[10] It recalls the soul once contained in the shell, and the revelation it invites.

The plaster bandage underlying Lee’s shell sculptures is materially unremarkable in color, texture, and form. It is typically used for temporary molds and discarded once the internal armature is restored. As material, it is secondary. It softens when wet and breaks when pressure is applied. It is sculpturally inconvenient. Yet, turned upside down, the disposable neutrality of the material is ideal for the artist’s intention to strip away the symbolic connotations of the human body and “sense it as a space where value categories are softened.”[11]

At this point, Lee prepares one more contradictory choice. The bodies she investigated for this work evoke archetypes belonging to entirely different temporalities than the provisional nature of plaster bandage: Donatello’s David, Beyoncé’s performances and costumes, angel sculptures in the Vatican, the Buddhist Medicine Buddha, Matisse’s Back reliefs, and sarcophagi of mummies became the spectral prototypes of these shells. She then betrays this choice once again.

“The highly subdivided conditions of the body as hardware—retrograde or limited from the perspective of contemporary sculpture—are recoded into concrete and detailed information values,” to be “recycled” and “hacked.” The normative forms of the body become riddles that disappear or appear in the casting process, generating events and sensations of transformation: sexuality, the grotesque, iconoclasm, the trembling of skin under pharmacological influence, and abstracted space.

Now one body remains, laid across the floor in contrast to those standing. The aluminum fragments, cast from the artist’s own body and reattached, raise a question: Lee’s sculptures choose a path unlike the tradition of sculpture that explores the artist’s body or the protagonist-like ego. These shells remind us of the human as the “body,” merely a material that “comes to life and returns to an inactive state.”[12] The plaster bandage evokes the processes of sealing the corpse into a mummy or making a death mask. It touches upon the body after existence is erased—either as the body after death or the body as object (which again summons skin and touch).

The corpse is sacred because it is an object; the living body also enters the category of object, paradoxically grounding our rights to the body.[13] The sculptural form of the “shell” began with the small ritual of casting the hands, feet, and faces of close friends visiting the artist’s studio, and in this exhibition became a visual language of carving bodily images out of a single person’s physical structure and conditions of movement. Once fragmented, the body is no longer perceived as a whole but as an object. When personality is stripped away, the value of the body as an “empty shell” makes us reconsider the human.


Text by Jinju Kim (Curator, Seoul Museum of Art)

 
Notes

[1] Although most of the works shown in the group exhibition (2022, N/A, curated by Jeppe Ugelvig), the exhibition 《Transposition》 (2021, Art Sonje Center, curated by Haeju Kim), and the two-person show Somingyeong x Eusung Lee 《Embassy》 (2021, Katalog Space) do not depict human bodies, they contain elements that can be read as bodily characteristics (volume, skeletal structure, bodily gesture). However, whether or not an actual human figure appears is a clearly distinguishable point, and for that reason I do not use these as evidence that the artist had already begun an exploration of the body.
[2] Although obvious, when you imagine it, it is something like the A-shaped width of broad male shoulders firmly planted in a vertical stance, the hat whose graceful curve seems to hold the wind of the American West at its apex, the guns holstered at the hips, and the focused gaze locked forward as he rides on horseback.
[3] Jesus was also a shepherd. Images of Jesus reimagined as a cowboy can easily be found on the Internet.
[4] For research on queer cowboys, I found this book: Chris Packard, “Queer Cowboys” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). For an article on the appearance of the queer cowboy in popular culture, see: C.S. Harper, “Why the cowboy has always been queer as folk in pop culture,” May 23, 2023, Alternative Press, https://www.altpress.com/queer-cowboy-pop-culture-history-explained/.
[5] Around 2021–2022, in English-speaking popular culture, a phenomenon emerged where middle-aged male actors were affectionately called “babygirl” by fandoms. A representative example is Pedro Pascal, who appeared in “Narcos.” See: Gavia Baker-Whitelaw, “What does babygirl mean? And why does it refer to middle-aged men?”, May 10, 2023, Daily Dot, https://www.dailydot.com/unclick/what-does-babygirl-mean-men-fandom/.
[6] Was the expression—calling a sculptor a cowboy—suggesting someone who handles mass and weight as if standing alone in the wilderness, enduring the weight of the world? Is the gender implied in the cowboy separate from the sculptor’s own gender or sexuality?
[7] What makes “betrayal” so compelling in Lee’s work is the surrealism expressed in her sculptural language. By comparison, the works in this exhibition are strongly shaped by the realistic framework of the human body; that influence cannot be erased. Although divided, interlocked, or inverted, the viewer still cannot abandon the shape of the human figure. Should we assign value to the leap from surrealism into figuration? Or insist that surreal elements still remain? Neither development seemed particularly interesting.
[8] Didier Anzieu, The Skin-Ego, translated by Kwon Jung-ah and Ahn Seok (Seoul: Human Heukguk, 2008), 42.
[9] Legacy Russell, Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto, translated by Dayeon (Seoul: Media Bus, 2022), 109–111.
[10] Giorgio Agamben, The Signature of All Things, translated by Yoon Byung-eon (Seoul: Jaum & Moeum, 2015), 154–159.
[11] Unless otherwise noted, all quoted passages in quotation marks are from the artist’s own words—most are taken from the artist’s notes shared via Google Docs. July 2023.
[12] Jean-Pierre Baud, The Stolen Hand, translated by Kim Hyun-kyung (Seoul: Ieum, 2019), 128.
[13] Jean-Pierre Baud, The Stolen Hand, 48–68.

References

• 《카우보이 (Cowboy)》)