The Brooklyn Rail

Step closer, and the face retreats. Lee Yong Deok’s sculptures at Gallery AP Space turn vision back on itself, transforming convex into concave, solidity into void. What appears to emerge from the wall is, in fact, a hollow—an image produced through absence. At once uncanny and tender, these “inverted sculptures” stage a quiet crisis of perception: what looks full is empty, and what seems absent insists on being seen.

Long celebrated in Korea as the pioneer of “inverted sculpture,” Lee (b. 1956) makes a belated New York debut with highlights from a practice he began in 1984. Persisting in figuration while many of his peers pursued abstraction, he developed a language that fuses optical illusion with philosophical reflection. His concave portraits, cast in fiberglass and resin (FRP), translate the Eastern principle of yin and yang—complementary forces in perpetual transformation—into sculptural form. Presence and absence, fullness and void, become interdependent rather than opposed.

That paradox begins in process. Each piece starts as a mold meant to be discarded: the cast, technically a negative, becomes the finished work. “I create what’s going to be thrown away,” Lee said in conversation. Every gesture anticipates its own reversal, compelling the artist to imagine from the other side. In this inversion, making and unmaking coincide; creation becomes inseparable from loss. This practice unsettles not only the sculptural tradition, but the ontology of vision itself. By reversing interior and exterior, Lee turns the act of looking into an encounter with its own limits—a meditation on how presence is perceived only through its withdrawal.

To encounter these works is to enter a perceptual puzzle. From one angle the surface appears to project; from another, it caves inward. Lee extends Ludwig Wittgenstein’s idea of “aspect perception”—the shifting of meaning according to one’s interpretive frame—into the realm of the body. What for Wittgenstein remains a mental flip of seeing-as becomes, in Lee’s hands, a spatial event: the instant when void and volume trade places due to a viewer’s own movement. At this juncture, Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology becomes a critical point of reference—vision is made reciprocal, a field in which the seer and the seen intertwine. Physical movement completes the work, yet that completion is perpetually undone with every step. Unlike Op art, which overwhelms the eye with abstraction, Lee’s illusion unfolds subtly, always retaining the human form. The distortion is not mechanical but psychological: to stand before one of these hollows is to sense both another’s presence and one’s own echo. Illusion becomes intimacy.

Lee’s work also extends the lineage of Western illusionism, from trompe-l’oeil to M.C. Escher and Hans Holbein’s The Ambassadors (1533). Holbein’s anamorphic skull, visible only from a single oblique angle, demands that the viewer reposition themselves to grasp its message. Lee’s concave faces, by contrast, transform continuously, refusing any fixed point of revelation. If Holbein’s skull freezes time in a flash of memento mori, Lee disperses it across motion—shifting from the Vanitas to the phenomenology of seeing, where life exists only in encounter. The image lives only as long as the viewer moves. Illusion here is not deception; instead, it is an embodied recognition that seeing is always in flux.

Color further complicates this perceptual play. Lee’s palette enacts a kind of double negative—a simultaneous photographic and sculptural inversion. In The Couch (2008), a cool mint-green figure stands before a maroon sofa, their contours intersecting like layers of a digital composite. The hues—pitched to an artificial, almost synthetic intensity—evoke the tonal reversal of film negatives. “I do not use natural colors,” Lee explained. “Color creates space, and space defines time.” Natural color, for him, fixes an image to a moment. His chromatic inversions thus conjure a world suspended in motion—a continuum of shifting light and perception. The result is not photographic but phenomenological. Color too becomes a field through which time, space, and memory intermingle. Filtered through the cool gloss of reproduction, each sculpture feels as if it were formed not by technology but by perception itself—an emulsion of memory and thought. In Walking (2006) and Standing (2024), shadow and stripe each heighten Lee’s optical tension. As the viewer shifts position, the linear bands in Standing vibrate, recalling lenticular movement. Yet Lee’s illusions remain resolutely analog—hand-carved, patient, and slow, privileging duration over instantaneity.

This doubleness—the inversion of both tone and form—positions Lee within broader debates on perception and ontology. Earlier critics have emphasized the indexical trace of his molds. Expanding on this, his concave surfaces operate as perceptual events: records not of what once was, but of what seems to emerge in seeing. His casts reveal not the body’s absence, but its resonance: a convex life born from a concave void. The index turns reflexive, recording absence while at the same time animating it. Hinging on perception’s instability, Lee redefines realism for the optical age—not as resemblance, but as relational truth.

Ultimately, Lee’s work transforms illusion into relation. His sculptures come alive only through the viewer’s movement, inviting empathy and attention. The void, quietly vital, holds the warmth of what has passed and what still stands before it.