Obsession/Love Forever aspires to come to terms with our contemporary vision of beauty by examining the crossover between the fashion industry’s construction of norms and contemporary myth created in cyber culture and computer gaming. My project is continuation of my on going series TOKI/Cyborg Project (2003~) which questions new technology’s role in image making and representation. My digital character TOKI parodies the idealisation of female form in Asian manga and anime, computer gaming and cyber culture. TOKI’s body has been cut into pieces – posing coyly to sit, move and beckon in the perfume bottle. The parts of the body become a product of beautification and commodity conflating power and seduction. The animated body parts parody the obsession with beauty created by phallic motivations in cyber culture and gaming, with the work referencing critical contributions from contemporary mythology, psychoanalysis, technology, cybernetics, aesthetics, plastic surgery, feminism, consumerism and eroticism.

The project features digital 3D animations consisting of 8 DVD projection installations and experimental sound connected to a surround sound system. Each DVD features an animation sequence of different parts of TOKI’s body captured and reacting with particles in a collection of perfume bottles. Each DVD is QuickTime DV PAL/NTSC format. The duration of DVD is approx 2 minutes.

Crystal Beauty Electro Doll is a part of the ongoing series TOKI/Cyborg Project: game, pop and cyber world, a project which focuses on character modelling. It considers how boy game culture encourages the fantasy of the perfectly constructed female body. The animation is edited screen recordings of the 3d animation modelling process which concentrates on the process of modelling and modification of TOKI’s body – lips, eyelashes, finger nails, hair, breast, bottom, high heels, and genitalia – in relation to plastic surgery. Crystal Beauty Electro Doll examines the recent boom in plastic surgery in Korea and its underlying psychological impulses. The artist, as creator of TOKI, takes over the role of re-defining and re-creating a female form to fit the requirements of the desirable body promoted by advertising and the media. Such images conventionally draw on white or Eurasian models thus promoting a western ideal of beauty that can only be achieved by Korean women through extreme modification. Using a 3D modelling process, Lee challenges the existing male dominated fields of both plastic surgery and 3D animation. TOKI goes under the knife to expose the radical surgical procedures undergone by women in order to achieve an ideal beauty. She is the product of the technologised perfection and commodification of the female body.

The artist examines the psychology behind the obsession to be beautiful, young and perfect, questioning the myth of technological perfection and by association, the contemporary obsession with bodily transformation. Beauty is now is a mass-produced commodity that can be purchased.

TOKI positions herself as both desiring and desirable subject. The eight parts of body also are a reminiscent of male fetish and masculine gaze that segregate women’s bodies into their various parts.

Crystal City Spun is a spectacle of sexually charged stimuli, which opens with a cityscape of spinning dildo towers. Out of the landscape emerges Dragon YONG, a vehicle for fantasy exploration by, TOKI, a highly stylized curvaceous, warrior-cum-vixen who draws upon the Japanese tradition of Manga, Korean animamix and Western ideals of sexuality and beauty. TOKI exists in a fantasyland ripe with testosterone-driven energy. To sadistically erotic effect, YONG taps TOKI’s exposed nipple with the tip of his pointy claw. This titillation sends TOKI into a pirouette. She stops only when YONG whips her with his whiskers which sparks the crystallization of both the landscape and its characters.

The video has a playful, childlike quality alluding to fantasy and toys such as pink bunny rabbits and digitally exaggerated reflections. But at the same time, Lee explores sexual innuendo, and plays with varying degrees of sexuality and sexual expression both with imagery and color.

Throughout my adulthood I have been dealing with the significance of shifting identity. My work reflects on my surroundings and deals with issues created by and from my understanding or confusion of contemporary pop culture around me. My work deals with cyberculture and cyberfeminism by representing TOKI as a vehicle for fantasy, sexuality, and identity. The paradise in my fantasy recollects all the memories from my childhood to adulthood, and the big shift from Korea to New Zealand to New York and back to New Zealand. From the organic nature of my old childhood house garden to the inorganic cyber world of fantasy and dream, my paradise exists in between these two worlds.

Strawberry Garden Lucid Dream is a fantasy world that evokes nostalgia for childhood. The project, an artistic project “in progress”, is a reflection on how the female sexual identity is perceived and used at a global level.