Eusung Lee Study of Model A, 2025
The Symbolon series, initiated in 2021, began as an experiment in combining two or three visual signs into a single, seemingly unified entity. By cutting away portions of form and crudely binding them together, the artist sought to reveal unexpected dynamics and new modes of existence. This recent work extends Lee’s longstanding interest in the body and mobility, departing from the imagery of humanity’s desire to invent the flying automobile.
The starting point was the curious, even comical impression left by Alef’s Model A—an imminently launching flying car. Rather than adopting a reductively negative or adversarial stance toward “technology,” Lee probes the deeper, layered desires that underlie such inventions. In 2025, as issues of war and environment dominate global consciousness, the persistence of humankind’s drive to reshape the landscape and velocity of the world elicits both estrangement and a measure of unconscious sympathy. The work revisits the fantasy of flight as an extension of bodily awareness. Concepts of speed, flight, and the automobile—an object that is itself a monumental art format—are transposed into torso-scale sculptural studies, where signs are stitched, knotted, and bound together to mutually sustain one another.
Wooden boots, cloth slippers, or foot-like forms, recurring bodily metaphors in Lee’s oeuvre, symbolize both pause and propulsion. Dragonfly wings fused with the rear of Model A and with the human foot constitute another recurrent motif. The dragonfly is a species long associated with the imagination of free flight: it surfaces in Leonardo da Vinci’s helicopter sketches and has persisted across time as both icon and ornamental image.
Through this sculptural methodology—at times appearing like a misspelling—the artist seeks to draw forth the abstraction embedded in the convention of figuration, the unfinished spaces within it, the disruption of bodily immersion and self-certainty, and the suspended, deferred time necessary to approach an understanding of these states.