As the viewer enters the exhibition hall containing 《Cost of Recovery》, they encounter a situation in which green windows color what would be normally a gray space, and an installation that captures the scene of some working environment is laid out in a somewhat dry manner. In addition, a gray and red-toned video serves to provoke their memories through its numerous 3D references, compelling the viewers to follow the artist’s intended narrative through its engaging use of graphics and flat textual images. The video, in which only the images of legs are shown close-up, combines legs walking for rehabilitation and legs running to emit an ambiguous atmosphere of documentary-style non-fiction and with narrative fiction.

Eunhee Lee’s 《Cost of Recovery》 delves into uncomfortable concerns about a marginalized and economic “body,” his points of critique range from a socially defined notions of disability and non-disability to the developing and capitalizing of medical technology and instrumentation throughout the pathology and rehabilitation process, and the issue of the labor behind such processes. The passive reality of returning to a “normal” body forces people to pay for this technology and to outlay the capital for their physical recovery as well as their social interests.

Through this new video and installation, the artist aims to disclose the negative social perception that considers disability as a body deprived of economic productive capacity and non-functional as a source of labor. It also demonstrates that the process of complementary technology/ subsidiary machinery and rehabilitation does not actually support overcoming the disability, but rather serves to alienate the source of the labor, the humans themselves.

Lee’s new work, AHANDINACAP, shows the dramatic process of overcoming the challenge of disability. The word “handicap” originates from “hand in a cap” which implies the rather contemptuous nuance of begging. The cause of this perceived tragedy is the negative social perception of disability, especially the prejudice against the “unproductive body.” In this context, rehabilitation connotes becoming “normal,” i.e. being freed from contempt and becoming a productive body.

However, the artist points out the current situation in which the human body and its labor are replaced by post-human technology as she addresses the tendency to replace the disability with a mechanical body part that introduces auto-mation technology, rather than pursuing a recovery of the body and mind. The artist claims that the desire of the patient, family and caregivers to assist patients and their recovery may not be a huge one, but maybe a small one equivalent to the simple and convenient function of a mobile phone app that can be applied in real life. As such, her work offers various layers of critique, engaging with subjects from new media discourse to the socioeconomic implications of disability.

The artist has been tracking the labor behind technology development, raising the issue of disability, rehabilitation, and assistance devices. During an instance of the rehabilitation process within her own family, she discovered that medical machines and the labor that assist the technology seem to fail to support the patient’s uncomfortable leg movements. As such, disability supplementation technology tailored to individual needs is not socially effective as it stands, so it is inevitable that cost will increase, or the technological development and its commercialization will be slow.

Perhaps that is why the bystander’s perception of disability is presented as an image of an actor holding a prosthetic hand with a dirty smile in the film, or of a wheelchair that adjusts the late Stephen William Hawking’s mouth, hands, and feet in television news. Market apathy for the disabled minority as well as the negative social gaze towards them alienates only the universal system of technology/machine production, and this deficiency is again replaced by manpower. Neo-liberalism allows us to focus on developing robots that replace simple labor rather than producing complementary products for the disabled minority.

Relative to the myth of Narcissus, an individual’s self-love leading to death, Marshall McLuhan penetrated the double-sided ambiguity of new media as an expansion of human capability as well as self-severance. Technologies such as computers and mobile phones have emerged to supply improved qualities of memory and information retrieval easily accessible to humans, but in the end, human memory itself has not been enhanced, and device capacity has been increased only through the system of continuously upgraded machines.

The world of the Internet has made humans dream of a new open community, but on the contrary, it has made us more self-absorbed and isolated. Can the media, already preoccupied with expanding the scope of human beings, replace and supplement human beings, especially those with disabilities? Aren’t we chasing only a rosy fantasy created by god-like cyborgs and AI robots that have been perfecting the fact of increasingly incomplete human beings in reality?

Another new work, LONGING, is a two-channel video that combines scenes of a main character running and of a patient undergoing rehabilitation on a treadmill. “The running protagonist in the movie is free, vulnerable, and quickly escapes from danger, and sometimes runs frantically… This work, collecting certain modified scenes without context, creates an mysterious feeling of nostalgia and sentiment, and creates images like a web-movie…

Contrary to the pain of the patient who reacts slowly in the course of their treatment, the audience as a bystander develops a feeling of boredom or longing for a quick recovery,” (from the artist’s notes). In her notes the artist points out that the awkward difficulties of rehabilitation suffered by the person with the disability are maximized by juxtaposing their effort with someone who runs freely. It also illustrates our indifference and desire to dispense with our boredom, and disengage with the desperation and pain felt by the patient.

Finally, EXTRA raises the issue of poor working conditions and neglected personal care labor. “In recent years, state-run organizations and companies have been developing and promoting ‘care robot projects’ to replace such caring labor in line with the growing population of the disabled and the elderly. The market trend to minimize labor costs and increase production rates mostly begins with eliminating readily replaceable labor,” (from the artist’s notes).

As described, the artist believes that the process of recovering from physical defects goes beyond personal boundaries, and touches upon issues of labor and technology relative to dominant socioeconomic logic, and in this regard, the artist stresses that the development and use of high technology includes the process of alienating existing labor.

Lee mentions that the exhibition is “a process of capturing and exploring a shrinking and passive body intertwined with the external environment.” She researched labor studies and sociology books and interviewed patients undergoing rehabilitation and nursing care in preparing this exhibition. Although her practice of art will not equate to the power of media reports or the practice of activists, she considers it in light of its positive ripple effects that might lead to social discussion and action.

Eunhee Lee’s work, in this context, focuses upon those bodies that possess a slight lack of ability to produce as well as the wider indifference and insensitive social logic that functions to define and mark such bodies, based on socioeconomic notions of efficiency and productivity. Her practice is concerned about the social role of art, and serves to reveal the situation beneath the surface from a perspective of the socially disadvantaged and practically amplify such disenfranchised voices.

With the recent phenomenon of the universal and flamboyant new media focusing on new flashy forms and virtual technologies of display in the ‘white cube’, there exists substantial active discussion on unraveling these works into a “post-” discourse, such as post-Internet and post-digital media discourses.

These conversations find meaning as we waking up from the utopian fantasies of post-media, post-structure, post-space, and an open community, an start to recognize ourselves. Even though Eunhee Lee’s works cannot be completely distanced from the dominant contemporary discourses of new media art, this exhibition is expected to create a new discussion at different points from those of the parallel “post-” series that proliferate within the contemporary art world.


Sewon Oh (Director of CR Collective)

References

• 《회생비용 (Cost of Recovery)》