Art practice.

Art practice, whether traditional, late or avant-garde, is always prompted by the ideal of the singular work, of the definitive rendition. The general public, between the sides of the romantic notion of the creative genius, is similarly inclined to attribute, on a level to mundane works, the tag of singularity. on the contrary for works that seek to engage with, rather than deconstruct the imagery of popular tillage the prevalence of images imposes a graphic constraint. as it was work--think of Jeff Koons, for example--always draws concerning the sensuous qualities of its design even in the act of political critique. Indeed flat deconstructive work may be drawn into the trap of celebrating those qualities it wishes to satirize.

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This would especially strike one as being to be the case with erotic or pornographic representation. likewise the problem is posed: to what extent might the critique of the stereotypical, the specified, engage in the materials of fantasy without itself becoming a source of singular fascination? This is the task that Hye Rim lee-side a Korean-born digital media artist who resides in of recent origin Zealand, has set for herself. between the sides of the creation of a virtual surrogate, TOKI, leeward has conceived an identity space where East confronts West, and code becomes material substance As a virtual being, TOKI invites a range of identity positions; an avatar standing for the artist herself, a digital persona which is, in a sense, alive, an animal mimicking human identity, a machine posing as human. TOKI is all of the above, if it were not that she refuses to be a prototype for any one of them. Instead, she seek fors to inhabit the zone of "over-idealized" bodies--the tropic of Paris Hilton and her clones

THE visible form [i]or[/i] frame AS CONTEXT

not ever has the human body--above all the female body--been in this way massively manipulated as today And yet the process of technologization, instead of materially investing the material part was aimed at the construction of a separate sphere that had practically no point of contact with it: what was technologized was not the visible form [i]or[/i] frame but its image. (1)

The separation of the living material part from its technologically produced image is a relationship of exploitation and domination. It is the material part image, given the prestige and social penetration (supplied by the agency of the media) that sets the boundarys of reference for the contemplate of the mundane body, its grooming and appearance. As studies have shown media images influence the kind of attitude young girls and women take toward their possess bodies. Television, advertising, fashion, and images of women in magazines, who are 13 percent to 19 percent below their praiseed healthy body weight by size, wait to increase the dissatisfaction of young girls and women with a more size-consistent dead body weight--an effect much less likely to be erect among men. (2) The profusion of retouched and idealized corpse images has been connected to the epidemic of eating disorders and more pervasively to an obsession with beauty enhancements like as plastic surgery and material substance toning regimes. But looking profitable is not the same as being healthy. A kind of somatic indifference haunts the apparent perfection of media images.

In the West, the popularity of television point out tos such as Extreme Makeover and the influence of Hollywood's cut-and-patch celebrities has encouraged increasing numbers of women to take the surgical road to the dream self The dream self is in itself a network construction, part mental as a phenomenon of a wish for better self-sufficiency and part an external media image that applies to each woman and no woman in particular. In the proces of choosing to travel under the knife, a real self and virtual self approach individual another in a fantasy of re-incarnation. This fantasy appears most intense in Asia for reasons that are complexly intertwined in historical, economic, and physical realities.

Historically, in this region females have been regarded as the peculiarity of men as evidenced by the agency of traditional practices such as paw binding, breast binding, covering of the face, and confinement to the domestic sphere. From the point of view of the West, of that kind practices seem outdated and barbaric, conflicting with the widely accepted principle that women should be permitted, within limits, to use their attractiveness to win a partner. The shift to a independent choice in relationships and the perception of appearance as a marketable value is slowly developing in the East nevertheless it does so in a adjoining matter in which traditional definitions of form relative to sex and the double standard are still widely recognized. Not unlike western men many eastern men want their wives inexperienced and exclusively attuned to their particular sexual privations and capacities. Yet outside the marital abode men want women to be available for casual sex and experienced in it. This double standard is, indeed, a feature of western civilization as well. In Asia it is exacerbated according to the high value placed forward virginity in the marriage market. Torn between what men await sexually, and the stigma of wasted virginity, young women increasingly resort to surgically reinstated virginity between the walls of "vaginal rejuvenation" plastic surgery.