He offers us music. The work titled Bittersweet Symphony functions as a kind of prelude, laid out by Lee Donggi to guide viewers into his artistic universe. Within the painting, the face of a serious musician appears alongside the melting yellow face of Atomaus. Beside them emerges the face of a wolf bearing the same expression—recalling how, at the moment of its birth, Atomaus was said to resemble a wolf.

Mountains, brain scan images, the symbols @ and $, and cartoon-like signs—various images and symbols that resist clear association—are arranged together within a single frame. Elements that carry meaning coexist with those that do not; Atomaus and what is not Atomaus occupy the same pictorial space. The world they form is, as the title suggests, both “sweet” and “bitter.”

The era of modernism, which longed for pure “unity,” has long since come to an end. The story that Lee Donggi presents is a bittersweet symphony of the age of convergence—where heterogeneous and at times opposing elements collide and combine to generate something new.

BRAIN SCAN directly reveals Lee Donggi’s methodology. The figure in the painting, reminiscent of a scene from a science fiction comic, wears a large helmet connected by numerous lines. It is as if all active–passive reactions and the processes of consciousness and the unconscious occurring inside the brain are being closely examined. The array of diverse images seen in the previously mentioned A Bittersweet Symphony series can be understood as the result of such a brain scan.

Advertising images, newspaper articles, a frame from a comic, a sentence from a novel, a scene from a film, lyrics one finds oneself humming along to—our brain is the space where countless stimuli and layers of information are consciously and unconsciously accumulated, erased, distorted, and transformed. This effort to unravel the multiple cultural strata embedded within our minds elevates Lee Donggi beyond the category of a simple Pop artist.


 
Atomaus in the Age of Convergence
 
First appearing in 1993 and opening the door to Korean Pop Art, Atomaus stands as a paradigm of cultural convergence. Atomaus is a Korean-born hybrid, combining the American character Mickey Mouse and the Japanese character Astro Boy. Lee Donggi emphasizes that the Korean peninsula is a place where continental and maritime cultures flow together.

Korea has achieved remarkable economic growth, and alongside it, cultural exchange and generational shifts have accelerated, resulting in complex collisions and hybridizations of culture. Emerging from this context, Atomaus is not a culturally ambiguous hybrid without nationality, but rather a historical testament that embodies Korea’s condition of cultural hybridity. In its recent trajectory, Atomaus even appears to move toward self-erasure, while simultaneously embracing these diverse hybrid states in new ways.
 
Unlike American Pop Art of the 1960s, a common characteristic of Pop Art that emerged in Korea, China, and Japan after the 1990s is the use of characterization. Not only Atomaus, but also figures such as Yue Minjun’s Laughing Man, Fang Lijun’s Bald Rogue, and Takashi Murakami’s DOB appear as characterized subjects. This reflects the increasing influence of animation, television series, and film on our lives.

Characterization facilitates the collection of popular cultural images, a fundamental function of Pop Art. At the same time, characters inevitably reflect aspects of society and are capable of conveying messages in a highly direct manner. As the artist states, “Atomaus, a product of the unconscious, is both an alter ego of the individual and a manifestation of the social and cultural context that has shaped that individual.”

Having accumulated over two decades of history, Atomaus—born and raised within Korean society—has become inseparable from “us.” It now serves as a figure that encourages reflection on one’s own history (art history) and fosters a mature understanding of others living in the same era.


 
Atomaus Across Art History
 
It was Pop artists who called back viewers who had once turned away, intimidated by the difficulty of abstract art that insisted on formal purity. By actively discovering and embracing images from popular culture, they opened a space for communication. Atomaus, however, does not remain satisfied with simply incorporating popular culture. Through its distinctive and inventive ability to transform, Atomaus appropriates key traditions in art history and suggests the possibility of a new paradigm.
 
In the 2000 work Flower Garden, Atomaus appears in a piece that has been widely loved and rendered in various color versions. With a playful audacity, Atomaus mimics the serene, meditative posture of the old scholar depicted in Kang Hee-an’s 15th-century Joseon painting Scholar Viewing the Water. It is one of the most strikingly beautiful moments in Korean contemporary art. Its gaze is clear and earnest, and the overall tone is calm and transparent.

The aged scholar in Scholar Viewing the Water seems to remain quietly within pure nature. Yet Atomaus, gazing out from a vividly colored flower field, steps out from the garden and begins to move busily, engaging in acts of role-playing. It transforms into a rock star, a Bodhisattva in contemplation, and a guitarist, leaping into the pictorial space with playful gestures.

Among Lee Donggi’s works that fuse opposing elements into a single scene, the most daring is the ‘Double Vision’ series. Art history conventionally divides and opposes figuration and abstraction. Early abstract painters such as Malevich and Kandinsky even left behind harsh criticisms of figurative art.

However, in Lee Donggi’s paintings, abstraction and figuration do not oppose one another but choose coexistence. In Coin Atomaus, in order to respond to the flatness of abstract painting, Atomaus is flattened like a coin, becoming planar. The monochrome palette also alludes to the single-tone aesthetics of the Korean monochrome painting movement.
 
The effort to balance and integrate opposing elements can also be seen in his early works. He created numerous paintings in which contrasting elements appear as pairs within a single scene, such as Men/Women, +/-, Sky/Earth, Human/Hero, and Left/Right. And now Lee Donggi goes beyond himself. Understanding the world through binary oppositions is a typically Newtonian, modernist mode of thinking.

In the 21st-century digital age, where “virtual reality” has become a significant aspect of life, there exists a vast diversity that cannot be grasped through such simplistic binaries. The artist describes the act of embracing this diversity with the term “eclecticism.” Although the term may be somewhat misleading, his message is clear: the complexity and hybridity of the world, and ultimately their convergence. This is the world he seeks to depict.


 
Atomaus’s ‘Role Playing Game’
 
Atomaus’s ongoing role playing game vividly reflects the sensibility of the age of digital convergence. What we gain through voluntary “othering” is a deeper understanding of both others and ourselves. The other is not a separate and unfamiliar being, but another potential state of the self. Atomaus suddenly becomes a baseball player or a guitarist, and at the same time transforms into Picasso, Andy Warhol, or Marcel Duchamp.

In a photograph taken by the Surrealist photographer Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp boldly rejected conventional portraiture. Duchamp, who opened an important chapter in modern art, broke away from the fixed notion that one’s essence can only be revealed through a frontal portrait and instead presented a rear-view portrait.

On the back of his head was a star. From that star, many modern artists followed, including those working in object art, conceptual art, performance art, and Pop Art. Atomaus, who had become Duchamp, soon transforms again into Andy Warhol, complete with a silver wig and sunglasses. This act of becoming another—this role playing—is part of Atomaus’s convergence project, in which opposing elements are integrated within itself.

But even if convergence is all well and good—what is this sudden appearance of a large ear attached to the back? No need to be startled. This is Atomaus transformed into Stelarc, the Australian performance artist. Stelarc is an experimental artist who has pursued bodily expansion through hybrid projects between humans and machines. His work is closely related to the media theory of Marshall McLuhan.

As early as the 1960s, McLuhan argued that media extend human senses, and that such extensions would ultimately bring about revolutionary changes in human thought and behavior. Today, experts suggest that the development of digital technology is even dissolving the boundary between humans and technology. Some scholars argue that our everyday thinking and behavior are already deeply intertwined with digital devices—computers, the internet, smartphones—indicating an ongoing process of human “cyborgization.” Stelarc carried out a work titled Third Ear, in which an ear was surgically implanted onto his arm.

This project demonstrates his vision of the “post-human” (cyborg), in which human and machine are physically fused. The phenomenon of digital convergence, encompassing not only machine-to-machine integration but also human-machine fusion, reveals that our sense of self is no longer autonomous but inseparably intertwined with technological environments.

Atomaus, in this instance, performs with a large ear grafted onto its back instead of its arm. It may appear grotesque, but if we could see with our eyes, hear with our ears, and also listen through an additional ear on our back, perhaps we might become more oriented toward others. From a humanistic perspective, Atomaus may in fact represent a further evolution beyond Stelarc.

References

• [비평] 세상의 모든 분열을 융합하는 21세기 연금술
  [Critique] A 21st-Century Alchemy that Fuses All Divisions of the World