ANDREW YONG HOON LEE
The Syncretic Agora of The Song or I Became A Portal Before I Burst Apart, 2021
single-channel video, sound
17 minutes, 47 seconds
Andrew Yong Hoon Lee’s The Syncretic Agora of The Song or I Became A Portal Before I Burst Apart is an assemblage of collaged footage that creates a situation that asks us, the viewer, to become an active participant in its creation. A condition of the work is that we become editors in how the narrative of the work is to be read. Without a singular narrator, we are open to the possibility of multiple vantage points and perspectives where an ecology of relations resides. As an artist who works with sound and music as their primary language, Lee invites us to think and feel with him as the work moves between resonant dimensions of image, text, and the sonic, and enacts a kind of musical relationship between activator and resonator. He shares, “I wanted to see if I could occupy the space of the moving image as maybe more like a songwriter.” The song is only made possible by the ensemble, where parts of the whole allow for multiple readings, rather than a singular understanding of the work. Synthesizing this conceptual strategy, a text overlay declares, “the song is thinking,” while, earlier in the film, found footage of the great experimental visual artist and poet Roy Kiyooka attests to the instability of language: “the more one handles words, the more they can’t possibly be your own.”
We are also asked to bear witness to sympathetic experiences of the human condition as an endurance dirt bike racer, who has hit his limit and is moved to tears by his supporters, is shown in a moment of complete vulnerability. In other instances, the camera lingers on a war monument overlooking still water, a tender moment in the life of the elderly, or slow-motion footage of a man performing a traditional dance—each speak to Lee’s own diasporic consciousness as a Korean Canadian. Time and mortality figure strongly, punctuated by an infinite swirling spiral and a vast star filled sky. Moving between the spiritual and embodied realms, and the transformations that exist in between, further text overlays convey, “every moment a montage of the body…liquid becomes gas…the sensations of known and unknown elements.” Throughout, the spiritual resonance of sound is foregrounded. The span of human emotion is finally, and profoundly, captured in the footage of the PS22 Chorus children’s choir performing a melancholic pop song cover. Music drives the assembled images, a formal strategy the artist critically engages with to highlight the relationship between image and sound, demonstrating how new poetic and political potentials are possible when deep listening is practiced.
A simultaneous question and statement— “how to become a passage”—permeates the video, probing a shared diasporic awareness, that liminal space of searching for home, while being neither here nor there. Passages suggest a space in between, on the way to and from, and a space where one can imagine what is yet to come. The Syncretic Agora of The Song or I Became A Portal Before I Burst Apart offers an experiential undetermined journey.
Artist Biography
Andrew Yong Hoon Lee (b. 1982, Canada) is a multidisciplinary artist, musician, and composer. Often working collaboratively, his work culminates in installations where relationships between media generate affective intensities of sensorial experience, examining the poetic, political, and philosophical possibilities of light, space, and sound.
Lee has presented work, texts, lectures, compositions, and performances at the The 13th edition of the Gothenburg International Biennial for Contemporary Art; Center For Performance Research, New York; Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden, Germany; Emily Carr University of Art + Design, Vancouver; The Stone, New York; Akademie der Bildenden Künste Nürnberg; The Poetry Project & Wendy’s Subway, New York; The Vancouver Art Gallery; The International Symposium On Electronic Arts, Vancouver; The Asia Pacific Foundation of Canada, Vancouver; Achtung Cinema, Paris; Kinoskop International Analog Film Festival, Belgrade; Ann Arbor Film Festival, Michigan; Radio Alhara, Bethlehem; and Fridman Gallery, New York, among others.
As a musician, composer, and performer, Lee has released full-length recordings, scored music for feature-length films and documentaries, and toured extensively throughout the United States, Canada, and Western Europe. Lee received a Bachelor of Arts from Simon Fraser University, Vancouver and a Master of Fine Arts from the Milton Avery School of the Arts at Bard College, New York. He teaches fine art, photographic practices, moving image, and visual culture at the New School in New York.
The Syncretic Agora of The Song or I Became A Portal Before I Burst Apart, 2021
video still, single-channel video, sound
17 minutes, 47 seconds
photo courtesy of the artist