Soyoung Lee, Walking on Mudflats, 2024, video, 4min 21sec © Soyoung Lee

A woman slowly walks across the mudflats. Each time her feet stick to and pull away from the mud, footprints are left behind with a sticky suction sound, and soon the rising tide covers them. Soyoung Lee’s work begins here.

This scene is not a performance accidentally captured by the artist, but rather something closer to a fundamental scene that opens her artistic world. Instead of proving a sculpture as a completed form, the artist focuses on the time of formation just before a shape comes into being, when clay, body, and place respond to one another and anticipate a certain form.

For this reason, the questions Soyoung Lee asks are fundamental. Is the space in which we are rooted truly unchanging? And in the contemporary world, where physical space and virtual space are mixed together, does the “fixed place” that once anchored the subject no longer exist?

This fundamental recognition—that we may be beings who live by repeating provisional and temporary occupation and movement, like points briefly marked and then disappearing on the coordinates of a map—is the starting point of Lee’s sculpture. In her work, sculpture is less a solid object than a trace of movement left behind as clay shaped by the hand dries, collapses, and gathers together again.

The rhythms of cracking and erosion, collapse and recombination become the very content of the work. Unlike the tradition of sculpture that has taken permanent form as its ideal, Lee’s clay work draws time and disappearance into the center of sculpture, returning it not to a completed object but to an unfinished process.

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