Becoming Pollens
Location: Mine Factory, Pittsburgh
Year: 2013
Media: Powdered North and South Korean Flags
Media: Powdered Flags (South Korea and North Korea)
Size: 4 x 4 feet
Becoming Pollens_II
Location: Museo Juan Manuel Blanes, Montevideo
Year: 2014
Media: Powdered ags of the colors of eight national ags; Argentia, Chile, Czech, Korea(south), Lithuania, Poland, Uruguay, and the United States.
Size: Approx. 30 x 10 x 0.1 feet
Becoming Pollens is composed of the powdered flags of North and South Korea. The pile of powder has lost its original forms and meanings as national flags. It fails to be symbolized and reveals the very substance. The powdered flags posit in the new symbolic meaning of the re-unification between two Koreas.
“Objects, ideologies, and sounds are freed of their origins and move around like epidemic, contagion, and the wind to become new other things. Unbuilding is the erosion of the boundary that can allow for a new emergent whole.”
- Jaewook Lee
"In Becoming Pollens (2013), a mound of powdered fibers that were once woven into the flags of South and North Korea, effaced symbolic meaning becomes the only path toward reunification of the two countries. Lee's follow-up version of the work, shown at the Museo Juan Manuel Blanes in Montevideo, Uruguay, continued the trituration; this time, the flags repretned Argentina, Chile, the Czech Republic, South Korea, Lithuania, Poland, Uruguay, and the U.S., the countries of origin of the artists participating in the exhibition."
- Denise Carvalho (Sculpture Magazine, May 2017 p36)
