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Skin
Reviewed by George Slade
Photographs by June Yong Lee. Essay by Tina Takemoto.
The Arts at California Institute of Integral Studies, 2015. Unpaged, 30 color illustrations.
We should all be thankful for the interior structure our body gives us. That is, the cubic volume we occupy courtesy of bones, muscles, tendons, and cartilage keeping it all together, more and less, over time. I express this gratitude as I consider June Yong Lee’s photographs of unwrapped torsos; skin, seen in planar fashion, as though a rug on your floor, a tapestry on your wall, or a blanket on your bed, loses whatever seductive qualities it had when it was still enwrapping a body. I say this about human epidermis, of course. Other animals, skinned, yield pelts and hides of great value, enhanced through the rendering.
Lee’s renderings, fortunately for him, his viewers, and especially his subjects, are accomplished optically and digitally. The end results are on one hand profoundly disturbing — think of gruesomely fetishistic bookbindings, lampshades, or Jame “Buffalo Bill” Gumb’s new clothes (in The Silence of the Lambs) — while on the other uncannily fascinating. These are not (I hope) conventionally seductive images, but you may find it difficult to shift eyes and attention away from them — especially so, I imagine, when printed at 31 by 53 inches and hung on a wall, and sufficiently so in this book.
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| Skin. By June Yong Lee. The Arts at California Institute of Integral Studies, 2015. |
The images are printed double truck, full bleed throughout the book. Thus, as you read the book and turn a page you unfurl a new canvas in front of you, between your hands. You read these images like blueprints, or maps, although you may, as I did, occasionally jump, symbolically speaking, from map to mask (nipples and navels as eyes and mouths) to the pallid underside of a ray. Full versions of the images appear in thumbnails at the book’s end; that compact gallery affords a clearer sense of the impression Lee’s work makes.
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| Skin. By June Yong Lee. The Arts at California Institute of Integral Studies, 2015. |
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| Skin. By June Yong Lee. The Arts at California Institute of Integral Studies, 2015. |
Lee chooses bodies well. He photographs them with what we might call democratic precisionism — enough modeling to capture contours, but otherwise the light rests on these skinscapes with the indifferent grace of a blanket of air. The details of moles, follicles, wrinkles, creases, bruises, tan lines, tattoos, stress and stretch marks, even the imprints of recently removed undergarments, add up to an abstract, inexpressible sum.
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| Skin. By June Yong Lee. The Arts at California Institute of Integral Studies, 2015. |
Volume gives us reference points, a sense of the person and the space they occupy. Lee’s photographs recast our visions of bodies. Our mind attempts to rewrap these corporeal containers and restore order, but these images will not submit. They spread wings of unpinned flesh. They resist narrative, and insist upon their topographic innocence and their universality, regardless of the surreal space in which they are encountered.—GEORGE SLADE
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GEORGE SLADE, a longtime contributor to photo-eye, is a photography writer, curator, historian and consultant. He can be found online at http://rephotographica-slade.blogspot.com/
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