Email address: steven.lee3@email.kpu.ca
Official website address: http://www.stevelee.art
Goal for this course...
Overall, I'm hoping this course will provide me with a deeper connection to both the world of Fine Art and the ways in which our broader culture and society intersects with it.
Welcome to my ePortfolio...
My Background...
I was born in a small B.C. town called Williams Lake which gave me an appreciation for the amazing beauty of our province's rural landscapes and wilderness.
Family is important to me, although in Williams Lake we were somewhat isolated from our extended family. My Dad was Korean, and when the Korean War broke out he had been going to medical school at Yonsei University, in Seoul, which is where South Korea is today. As such, he became isolated from a large part of his family as he grew up in an area that is North Korea today. I remember he didn't learn what happened to his family, including his parents and several siblings until almost forty years later in the late 1980s. When he came to Canada, he practiced medicine for a period of time servicing rural northern communities where he would fly in, meet with patients and then move on to the next small community. He eventually settled in Williams Lake where he met my Mom, who was born and raised in Vancouver, and later Gibsons.
Like my Dad she ended up in Williams Lake, somewhat alone, isolated from her own extended family. She has always been a very strong, independent and hard working woman who always had a life long love of horses and animals. This love actually saw her leave Gibsons after high school, mainly to get away from the troubled family she grew up with. She worked for the Gang Ranch and the Williams Lake Trail Riders Association for several years. Today, her health isn't too great and it reminds me how precious and short life is - she was once so involved in the farm where the horses she owned and trained were kept. She would ride on cattle drives, clean out horse stalls, drive large 4x4 trucks, load and transport horses and so much more. It was all demanding physical labor which would lead to her developing arthritis, the pain from which has been compounded by her degenerative disc disorder. But I can remember how she would be up every morning around 5:00 am to go and feed them. Sometimes I went with her. She did a lot of the housework and yard work as well - from preparing meals to cutting the grass and maintaining the yard - all so my Dad could concentrate on his medical practice and working at the hospital. She seemed to never rest.
My parents were together for a good decade before getting married, and a year later I would be born. One thing I'm proud to say is that my Dad was the doctor in charge of my delivery - so he was one of the first people to see me as a newborn - the person who gave me my first pat on the back. When I was twelve, my family moved to Surrey where I spent my high school years, which weren't fun as I was relentlessly bullied. But it was also during this time that I developed a love of Art. As a young adult I've lived in both Surrey and Vancouver, giving me an appreciation and understanding of Metro Vancouver as a region rich with history and a plethora of issues.
My Education & Work Experience...
After I high school, I first studied business and marketing management before working at the Kwantlen Student Association full time for ten years in a number of staff and elected positions. I've also worked at several companies including Future Shop (now Best Buy) and Backcheck, a company which specializes in conducting pre-employment background checks.
Currently, I'm a third year Bachelor of Fine Arts student at Kwantlen. Ultimately, I see myself splitting my time between working as a production assistant on film sets during Metro Vancouver's warmer months and doing my own studio artwork in the cooler rainy months our area is infamous for.
My Artistic Practice...
Overall, my artistic practice sees me explore a range of artistic mediums including:
Creative Writing;
Digital Media & Photography;
Drawing & Painting;
Performance Art; and
Sculpture & Installation.
As my practice has developed, I've found that the lines between these mediums have become blurred as I develop an interdisciplinary approach to my work that draws and pulls from many of these mediums. Overall, my work explores several issues, including:
consumerism and the proliferation of waste;
my body image in contrast with contemporary western society's idealized image of males; as well as
our changing landscapes, and in particular the impact of development on both urban and rural areas.
My Recent Exhibitions...
I've recently been working more to get my artwork seen. For example, this past summer I submitted three works for the ARTS! 2019 Annual Summer Exhibition, organized by the Surrey Arts Council at the Surrey Art Gallery. I had two works accepted into the show - a photograph (titled "Faded Places") and a digital video piece ("From East to West" which placed third in its category). The Runner ran a piece titled KPU Students' Artwork Features at the Surrey Art Gallery, about Ryan Broderick and myself in August. I have a more in-depth summary of my exhibition history on my CV.
Video: Steven Lee, “From East to West,” Digital Video, May 4, 2012.
My Artifacts...
Provide a selection of 4 artifacts (image; video/video game; music; art) that is representative of the urban, visual, and screen culture that most interests you. For each artifact, please provide a brief description of what it is and why you chose it.
Artifact: Art Image
The image “69 Arhats” is one of many images I captured at the opening gala for the Takashi Murakami exhibition at the Vancouver Art Gallery in February 2018. I’ve long had a fascination of capturing images of not just artwork at museums but also of people interacting with these spaces. In the Pacific Northwest I like to regularly visit the Vancouver Art Gallery, the Audain Art Museum in Whistler, and the Seattle Art Museum (which runs the amazing Olympic Sculpture Garden, just a short walk away from the Museum itself, situated in an outdoor park overlooking Elliot Bay). Outside of the Pacific Northwest, I’ve visited spaces such as The National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa, the New Orleans Museum of Art, and The State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia. I also love to seek out smaller galleries and artists studios as well (for example when my friend Jessie Smith and I spent a month on a road trip across parts of Australia and New Zealand in 2010, we made it a point to uncover those kind of smaller, more intimate places that often fall outside of the more traditional tourist traps that house large institutional museums like the Vancouver Art Gallery).
Ultimately, I find that photographing people in these spaces is interesting because doing so is a bit voyeuristic. I like capturing moments where people are either deeply involved with a work (as seen in my image below), or when they’re using a smart phone to get a photo to send to a friend or post to their social media feed. To this end, I’ve been inspired heavily by photographer Thomas Struth, whose Museum Photographs are amazing. Our approaches are different, as my work is more of a quick and dirty snapshot aesthetic that ultimately lives on my Flickr feed; whereas Struth will setup and live at a spot in search of the decisive moments seen in his photographs (he also has his shots printed very large, which adds a deeper dimension to the photographs which is something I have never done with my shots). But both exist as a kind of art. Finally, for anyone interested in wanting to learn more about how to experience an art gallery on a more intimate level, I encourage them to read our professor Dorothy Barenscott’s article, “Focus on Fundamentals: How to Visit an Art Gallery” (which uses the same Murakami exhibit featured in my image below as the article’s foundational example).
Photo: Steven Lee, “69 Arhats,” Digital Photograph, February 2, 2018.Artifact: Film
One of the most watched clips on my YouTube channel highlights my love of film. It’s a two-second long video capture from the 2014 feature film "Godzilla” and features Ken Watanabe's character Ishiro Serizawa proclaiming "Let them fight!" during a key moment from that film. I’ve created several clips like this which I've dubbed "short takes," an ongoing video art series I started to feature individual quotes from different feature films. The quotes are very specific moments, only a few seconds long and I don’t include any filler of what comes before or after a featured quote is said. All of the quotes have taken on a life of their own in the broader context of contemporary pop culture, and some have become even larger than the films they were originally in.
Video: Steven Lee, “Let Them Fight,” Digital Video Movie Clip, January 7, 2015.
Artifact: Music
Growing up, I played the piano and actually made it through to the sixth year of the Royal Conservatory of Music piano program when I was a teenager. But I gave up piano to concentrate on my burgeoning interest in painting which was taking up more and more of my time (in hindsight I wish I had continued the piano as you could teach once completing grade 8 and that would have provided good income on the side!). Beyond that I’ve always enjoyed a wide range of music from classical to country to urban hip hop, jazz, rock and more. For my music artifact I settled on a song by local rock musician Matthew Good called “Decades” (2017).
I chose this song and its accompanying music video because I feel it helps to illustrate the movement of time for individuals. I’m fast approaching a precipice in my life (that some call middle age) where I’m able to look back on my youth and what it held, but also begin to understand and contemplate the older man I will hopefully live to become. Humanity tries to retain its youthfulness in body, mind and spirit and I know that I don't necessarily feel as though I've changed much over time. And yet this change is apparent over time - I definitely don't look the same as I did when I was in my late teens or early twenties. And a photo of me in twenty years, when I'm approaching age sixty definitely won't look the same as a photo of me today. So I appreciate the video and the song for contemplating this change and the impact time has on us all. Overall, music videos seem to be an almost lost art today, something reserved for top commercial artists like a Lady Gaga as opposed to a smaller commercial artist like Matthew Good (I admit I was conflicted about what song to chose, I almost selected "Bad Guys Win," whose video provides a critique of the control exerted over the news cycle).
Artifact: Video Game
This gaming artifact, “Sorentokai’s Pokémon Go” is an image comprised of over two dozen in-game screenshots of Pokémon I’ve caught including my: Pokémon with perfect stats; shiny Pokémon; shadow and purified Pokémon; as well as the top nine Pokémon with high combat power. The image also includes a screenshot of my in-game avatar, and a screenshot of the part of the game that indicates how much experience points (XP) I’ve accumulated and the date I started playing the game.
My friend Jessie Smith got me back into gaming. Her Mother has been an avid gamer and as such Jessie grew up being exposed to a variety of consoles from Atari to Nintendo and more (I think the only one they didn’t have was the Sega Master System, which was the console of my own youth as our neighbour’s family had the Nintendo). When Jessie and I lived together I ended up getting a Sony PlayStation 3 and later an X-Box 360 (but only because the one I bought was produced to look like the robot character R2D2 from Star Wars). We also had a Nintendo Wii-U and would often have friends over for Super Mario nights where we’d play those games for hours after consuming a few too many beers.
When I got my first iPhone, an iPhone 4 (followed by a 5S that I still use today), I started to play mobile games. Specifically, there have been three games I’ve played the most: Smurf’s Village (a 2010 social mobile game I no longer play after my extensive game data disappeared in 2018 after 8 years of building a huge village); Marvel: Contest of Champions (a 2014 mobile fighting game I had to quit cold turkey in January 2016 because it was taking up way too much of my time); and Pokémon Go (which Wikipedia describes as being an augmented reality (AR) game with multiplayer components that “uses the mobile device GPS to locate, capture, battle, and train virtual creatures, called Pokémon, which appear as if they are in the player's real-world location). With Pokémon Go, I have to leave the house to play it, so the only thing I do at home is send in game gifts and delete Pokémon that aren’t worth keeping. In that respect the game hasn’t become the overwhelmingly addictive experience that the Marvel game had become.
Overall, I enjoy the social aspect of Pokémon Go, as you can join groups through Facebook, and a chat application called Discord, to organize meetups for completing in game tasks and events. I’ve met and formed friendships with many who play, from families to even a few elderly retired people. I’ve also found several Kwantlen students and professors that regularly play. The South Surrey group I’m in often carpools together to complete game related tasks and then we go for lunch or dinner together. And the friendships have expanded beyond Pokémon as many of us go to movies together and have gone to things like the PNE or the Richmond Night Market together (a few even travelled to Chicago together earlier this year for a large Pokémon event called Go-Fest which is organized by the game’s developer). And when I’ve been in local art exhibitions a number of players have come to see my work (in fact, one who now lives in Squamish working as a financial advisor, still comes down to see my stuff when it’s being exhibited).
Finally, part of the AR aspect of the game is to take photos of Pokémon before catching them. To that end, in 2018 I created a Pokémon themed Instagram account to feature a specific character Mew, being featured in photos I composed and shot in and around Metro Vancouver. Unfortunately, I don’t post to it as regularly as I should, so it’s never really taken off. But my proudest moment related to the game has to be related one particular photo I took of a Pokémon at the Vancouver Art Gallery and posted to my This Date in Art History Twitter feed. The post actually attracted the attention of those running artist Ai Wei Wei’s Twitter feed (I say that as I assume he has a team of assistants helping to manage it), as I got a follow from them within hours of that post.
Photo: Steven Lee, “Sorentokai's Pokemon Go!,” Digital Photograph, September 13, 2019.Extra Exploration Sidebar...
Banksy Does New York: A Reflection...
Using your Week 1 observations, reflections and notes you made for the film Banksy Does New York (2014) on how your specific area of focus (the city, the audience, or the screen) impacts the way Banksy’s art is produced, circulated, and discussed, please write one paragraph summarizing your observations on the question posed in class. As part of the reflection, please locate and upload one artifact (this can be a still image, video clip, or artwork from the movie or elsewhere) to help illustrate your argument.
1/ Aspects of the City
Banksy Does New York (2014) presents many ideas on how Banksy's work operates and interacts within New York City itself. The film opened by concentrating on the idea of how the city swallows up Banksy's work by showing an attempt to take down a balloon piece. The film then highlighted how during each day of this curated event, citizens of New York City were on a hunt to find and view that day's piece before it was either removed by other citizens, the police, city workers, shop owners or art dealers. In this respect, the City served as a kind of playground for Banksy to place his work in and for citizens to interact with it by photographing it, defacing it, painting over it, protecting it or outright removing it. And some work actually moved through the city itself, as seen by the stuffed animals imprisoned on a truck, likely being sent to slaughter (as seen in the photograph, "Sirens of the Lambs," pictured below right).
All of the pieces in this series of Banksy works were carefully placed by Banksy throughout New York City. Some of the works saw New York City itself as being an influence for their creation, drawing on aspects of New York City's own history as contrasted with its contemporary moment; as well as drawing on the city's socio-economic and class divisions, and examining local issues such as gentrification. Banksy was very cognizant of how people searched for his art, and how they would end up in parts of the city that they might not normally visit. By contrast, other works were influenced by events that occurred elsewhere in the world, and by placing them within New York City Banksy created a dialogue between the city and the larger global world.
Photo: Steven Lee, “Banksy Meat Truck / Sirens of the Lambs,” Concept Art, April 30, 2014.The city's history as a major player in the world of art is also a significant factor as to why Banksy chose New York City for his 31 day guerrilla residency. It was mentioned during our class discussion that through this work Banksy was able to critique both New York City and the art world's views on the differences between high and low art. By interacting with New York, Banksy forced citizens, government, galleries and auction houses to re-examine how it values this kind of artwork.
3/ Aspects of the Screen
Banksy Does New York (2014) also explored many ideas on how Banksy's work operates in relation to screen culture. First and foremost, we are watching a documentary about how Banksy's work is received during a specific time period in which the work was created and displayed. The documentary footage captured images of the work as well as interviews with those who interacted with it. The viewers of the work were often shown as photographing or videoing the work or the events that occurred as a result of the placement of the work (such as people taking it down).
Viewers photographed and videoed Banksy's work primarily out of a desire to share the photographs and videos through their own social media pages. Doing so often gave those users a bit of street cred, and affirmation of their involvement in something that was larger than life. This interaction online also helped flame the buzz surrounding the residency and helped it to become a globally discussed trend. This alone helped give the art a new life far beyond where they were placed during Banksy's residency. In the documentary it was said how the main canvas for this work was ultimately, the internet.
The film also used a lot of found footage of the works and events, such as footage from the news. It also used the videos people shot documenting their journey searching for Banksy's pieces, on a race to find the pieces before they were altered, damaged or removed altogether. All of this activity further helped to feed the discourse surrounding Banksy and it was ultimately mediated by the screens being used to watch it unfold: be it via the social media posts by people who had the opportunity to view the work first hand; or via the big screen cinema or television screens that displayed the documentary about this event to those interested in learning more about it.
Finally, Banksy also used his website and social media feeds to help announce and inform each new work by posting videos, photos, writing and audio recordings across these digital avenues. All of this, including calling the month long event a "residency," served as Banksy's way of mocking traditional art institutions and ideas. Ultimately, this residency represented the scavenger hunt as an intersection of both traditional and new forms of media screen culture.
More on Banksy...
Another artifact related to Banksy that I stumbled upon is an artnet news article by Sarah Cascone, titled "A Photo of the Back of Banksy’s Head Sold for Nearly Ten Times Its Estimate at Sotheby’s London: The photo by Chris Levine purports to depict Banksy's hooded head." I liked how it referenced past videos that have been posted online featuring interviews with the elusive artist from early in Banksy's career.
Finally, after our first class in September 2016, I watched another documentary film on Banksy called Saving Banksy (2016), which serves as a great companion piece to Banksy Does New York. It's a more focused look at an approximately $40,000 effort to save one Banksy piece that appeared in San Francisco and get it into an art museum where it could be viewed by the public. Of course, should they ever be successful at getting it into a museum, it would provide a new legitimacy to the piece and to street art in the larger world of art and art history, which, as also seen in Banksy Does New York, has yet to be achieved. The trailer for Saving Banksy can be seen here:
Video: Colin Day (director), Saving Banksy, Documentary Film Trailer, 2:32am Projects, 2014.