Lee Soyo, A Dying Art, 2016, Digital print, 20.32 x 15.24 cm © Lee Soyo

Lee Soyo is an artist and independent researcher who examines the technologies and ethical issues arising from various forms of life-science research conducted within institutions that function as products of human culture, including museums, biomedical research facilities, and engineering universities.

She has attracted attention for her research on ornamental cactus design, which addresses the aesthetic manipulation of living organisms through the case of grafted cacti, one of South Korea’s major floricultural exports.

During a year-long research residency at a medical museum in the United States, Lee was responsible for restoring and conserving human wet specimens produced by physicians and medical students between the early 1900s and the 1960s.


Lee Soyo, A Dying Art, 2016, Fluid-preserved specimen, Dimensions variable © Lee Soyo

Through the exhibition 《A Dying Art》, Lee presents a series of snapshot photographs that meticulously document the routine procedures involved in this work.

The images offer glimpses into the unusual scenes a conservator encounters each day: century-old glass jars left dust-covered in the corner of a storage room; latex-gloved hands removing a mold-covered human heart; and the subsequent processes of washing it, constructing a support, treating it with preservatives, placing it in a new specimen jar, archiving it through paper labels and a digital database, and, in some cases, displaying it in an exhibition gallery.

The primary aim of the exhibition, however, is neither to explain standardized conservation techniques nor to cleanly “revive” decaying corpses. As of 2016, the status of human specimens within our culture is no longer what it once was.

Originally produced as models of scientific information concerning human anatomy and pathology, these specimens have since been transformed into cultural-historical artifacts that demonstrate outdated research methods and, furthermore, into spectacles and objects of anthropomorphism for paying visitors.

The impoverished collections-management environment Lee encountered was pervaded by the curators’ grim concern: “How can we open the wallets of ‘general admission’ visitors, rather than those of foundations, sponsors, or researchers at academic institutions, with the least possible investment?”

To address this problem, interns, students, and volunteers were mobilized, while the body of someone who had once lived and breathed passed through many hands, attracted attention, and was instrumentalized.

When these inexpensive spectacles that fill exhibition galleries so abundantly begin to decay and disappear over time, how should we respond? Should we wash them away with water? Burn them? Hold funerals and perform ancestral rites for them? Or would it be right simply to watch as they gradually vanish along with the museum?


Lee Soyo, A Dying Art, 2016, Digital print, 20.32 x 15.24 cm © Lee Soyo

Reflecting the collective concerns of the many people involved in handling such artifacts, Lee displays a fragment of a person’s body in one corner of the exhibition gallery. The material is abdominal fat from a fetus that had been classified as waste during the specimen-management process, and the museum instructed her that she could simply dispose of it down the drain (“You can just pour it down the drain.”).

Unable to bring herself to follow this protocol, however, Lee sealed the material in a zippered plastic bag and kept it for several years before deciding to present it once again to a new kind of audience. She hopes that it will provide an opportunity for open-minded and serious reflection on its identity, rather than being viewed as a grotesque spectacle.

The exhibition consists of approximately forty to fifty documentary photographs relating to “A Dying Art”, texts presenting instructions issued within the museum, and human specimens, offering a detailed view of Lee’s interest in living organisms and the processes through which she approaches them.

References