Siennie Lee

I have led a relatively comfortable life in South Korea. I attended a well-renowned institution, receiving both a bachelor’s and master’s degree in oriental painting, and was recognized for holding exhibitions and publishing books. However, when I traveled around the world as a travel writer and came to study art in the United States and Germany, I was humbled by the realization that I was only a small speck in the whole and large fabric of society. I inadvertently became a stranger and observer in a western environment, which was unwittingly discriminating against me; it did not see me in any way other than my outer appearance, which was only natural and with no fault, being unaware of myself or my achievements.

This predicament put me in a unique position as a bystander, where I apprehended the movements of life surrounding me. In an increasingly diasporic world, I observed the issues of a dynamic society: the shocking, the concerning, and the warming. But what made an impression was when I turned to see the streets outside the café window, away from the tides of information from the channels of media, life was normal and ongoing. The political and social turbulence that I heard starkly contrasted with the unexceptional and quotidian that I saw. However, the inconsistency was reconciled as I realized the disturbances were permeating and subsiding into the ubiquitous entropy of our society. This perception reminded me of the social organism theory.

Society can be seen as an independent being and ecological system, analogous to nature. Each element is an indispensable component of society, and they ultimately aggregate to constitute the whole of the world. To focus on describing my perception of society as a social organism, I collect pictures, sounds, and articles on current issues as a fundamental process of my work. I dismantle the images and superimpose those fragments, and assimilate them into an enigmatic landscape of a living organism. In addition, by using a self-made “Chladni’s Plates” to obtain abstract patterns from contemporary speech, I visualize the sounds by transcribing the vibrations of frequency onto the paper with water, salt and powdered pigments.