Youngho Lee, Black maria and the white city, 2009, Installation, Dimensions variable © Youngho Lee

Since cinema entered the museum, discussions surrounding the relationship and distance inevitably formed between moving-image art and the cinematic medium have remained unavoidable. Yet the art world has often maintained an attitude as though a tacit agreement of forgetting and compromise had already been settled in advance.

This is not to say that there have been no attempts or critical discussions. At times, certain artists — primarily those working from cinematic traditions — have brought film and projectors as cinematic apparatuses into exhibition spaces. However, perhaps due to an insufficient awareness of the distance between art and cinema, such attempts have frequently resulted in the fetishization and worship of cinematic devices themselves.

Within this context, Youngho Lee’s work is particularly significant in that it recontextualizes cinematic apparatuses through an original perspective on visuality and optical media.

Within art, cinematic apparatuses can be approached across multiple dimensions. One may address the mechanisms of the apparatus itself — its operations and ideologies as proposed through apparatus theory. At the same time, because cinematic apparatuses take the form of machines, they may also develop into installations and constructed structures.

Furthermore, the installation of machinery can be woven into relationships of analogy or opposition with the human body. Lee’s apparatus-based works activate these multilayered dimensions of cinematic devices. Her primary strategy lies in connecting optical apparatuses belonging to the prehistory or early history of cinema with other inventions created during the very same historical moment.

One fact cannot be overstated: cinema is, before being a “genre” that gradually evolved over time, an invention of modernity. This fundamentally distinguishes the nature of cinema from that of other genres or media.

In this sense, Youngho Lee’s return to the origins of cinema and her invocation of inventions from the same historical moment may be understood as an indirect strategy for properly confronting the moving-image medium itself — a medium that has become so excessively familiar and proximate that its essential nature and possibilities are often overlooked.

Interestingly, the contemporary inventions of cinema that Lee focuses upon largely take the form of “vehicles” or rides. Yet these vehicles do not truly transport their passengers anywhere. Instead, they ultimately return them to the very point from which they began.

Alongside the cinematograph, the roller coaster — also invented in 1895 — offered not geographical displacement through travel, but rather dizzying experiences of speed, height, and sudden descent, producing entirely new forms of visual perception. In this sense, the “passenger” effectively becomes a “spectator.”

Youngho Lee’s insight that questions of vision are inseparable from questions of speed remains relevant not only to the prehistory of cinema, but also to the development of contemporary moving-image media. In Flip Flap Loco (2009), film — which must move at a constant speed — transcends the projector and itself becomes a passenger on a roller coaster.

Faced with the unexpected encounter between film and structure, the viewer is prompted to reconsider the place where the spectator ought to stand, the object one is meant to observe, and the “proper” speed of viewing itself. A similar set of questions emerges in Film Machine (2012), which connects Black Maria, the cinematic apparatus invented in 1893, with the Ferris wheel created for the exposition known as the “White City.”

Here, questions concerning the proper position of the viewer and the effects of visuality become even more refined. This becomes especially apparent when compared with the earlier work Black Maria & White City (2009), which more concretely embodied the form of the Ferris wheel while directly and metaphorically presenting the optical apparatus of Black Maria through projected light.

Through this comparison, one can discern the direction toward which the artist’s concerns are evolving. Ultimately, the crucial issue lies in how these visual apparatuses are to be realized — in what form, at what scale and volume, through what degree of speed and distance, and within what structures and systems of connection — for these essential questions posed by the artist to fully penetrate their core.

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