page_title: Kyunghwa Lee
section_title: Flexile Panoptiosis: Mirror Room: Installation Art
hierarchical_section_title: Kyunghwa Lee / Works / The Zizek/Badiou Event of Philosophy 2013, Seoul, South Korea / Flexile Panoptiosis: Mirror Room: Installation Art
caption_attribution_description: English: Flexile Panoptiosis: Mirror box: Installation Art
context_page_description: KyungHwa Lee is a visual artist and new media artist exploring the experimental nature of contemporary art from the perspectives of architecture, fashion, and philosophy.
context_section_description: Designed specifically for the Zizek/Badiou Event of Philosophy 2013, the Flexile Panoptiosis occupied the smallest unit of the Kunsthalle gallery. This work challenged ideas of spatial and cultural authority.
  A "Hall of Mirrors" was originally built at Versailles by Louis XIV of France, le Roi-Soleil, in order to showcase the authority of France. This artwork features a new hall of mirrors, conveying the concept of decentralized authority. In a small room in the Kunsthalle, mirrors are placed on the left and right walls and on the floor and ceiling, while the front wall comprises a street-facing window covered with an image of the head of Queen Elizabeth I. At the base of the Queen's portrait, a large, red ruff collar sits at the level of her neck. This room of mirrors expresses the organic change inherent to ocularcentrism by using mirrors to explore the interrelationship of the viewer and the viewed.
  As soon as the viewers, who have been provided with ruffed collars, enter the room, they are dominated by the appearance of an endless array of ruff collars and view themselves through endless reflected images. The small room is transformed into an infinite world, while a viewer from outside the room will see a distorted shadow through the window. The opulent interior of the mirror room is simply perceived as flat shadows and reflections from the outside.
  In this space, viewers discover that they are slaves to subconscious desires that are not filtered through their perceptions. Rather than responding to the image of the Queen and the endless repetition of images with the awe and deference typical of art galleries, viewers interact organically with the mirror room, lying on the floor, making funny faces, and laughing at the results. While the artwork intrinsically projects power, viewers are able to free themselves from the authority of images.
caption: Flexile Panoptiosis: Mirror box: Installation Art
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