© Junghwan Sung

13th Art Division Excellence Award

Mr. Lee Experiment

Interactive art [Korea]

Junghwan SUNG,
Representing Mr. Lee Experiment creative team

Outline

Mr. Lee Experiment is an interactive installation that allows the viewer to move human experimental subjects between different environments that can then be observed. In this work, humans have been reduced to the same status as other species, that of experimental subjects.

Reason for Award

The first thing that struck me when I encountered this work that was submitted to the Interactive Art Section of Art Division, was that I could absorb the work’s experimental subject, i.e., a human being, place him into a dropper, and drop him anywhere I like. The point of using a dropper is that it is a tool that anyone can use, and is, therefore, familiar with. Anyone who experiences this work soon starts to relate himself with the experimental subject, and feels that he, too, might be absorbed and dropped somewhere, just as he does with the experimental subject in this work. Here, the presence of the human being is too weak to resist the liquid moving through the dropper. When I empathize with the experimental subject whom I see in the liquid, it becomes hard for me to breathe, and I feel pain. The effect creates a feeling in the viewer of going back and forth between two different aspects of human life—arrogance and weakness—by simply using the dropper. The work is a superb achievement on the part of the creators that it makes everyone want to try the experiment before they start to think logically about it.