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Film Archive
18 June - 4th July 2004 |
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Curatorial
Statement | Artist's
Résumé
AAAAAOOOOOHHH' sighs Toki, a female cyborg and a warrior endowed with superpowers.
She bats her eyelids, she giggles, she glances coyly at us. Toki embodies the
ideal woman, strained through a blend of Japanese manga cartoons, Western consumerism
and Korean tradition. She has the ultimate female fantasy figure - large fawn-like
eyes with lustrous lashes, tiny cinched waist and legs which go on forever. While
she owes a debt to both Barbie and the Japanese cartoon girl Sailor Moon, there
is an underlying sense of unease about Toki; as Hye Rim Lee has said, 'she can
be angelic; she can be evil'.
Auckland-based Korean artist Hye Rim Lee has been working with the character
Toki since her third year at the Elam School of Fine Arts at the University of
Auckland. Toki has evolved over the years, originally appearing as an actor wearing
a rabbit head-dress, morphing first into a plastic doll and, finally, into a
3D computer-animated cyborg. Lee's intention is that eventually Toki will star
as the heroine of her very own video game.
In BOOM BOOM: super beauty super heroine, Toki's emergence
as a fully formed cyborg is charted: the formation of her
delicate high-heeled feet, her perky breasts, the plastic
perfection of her face. Lee has said of her practice 'I want
to explore fun, dream, fantasy and popular culture. My works
will be designed to evoke multi-sensory sensation.' With each
evolving incarnation, Toki moves beyond a singular character
into a multi-level digital environment which inserts itself
into a wider dialogue about the relationship between technology
and humankind.
Emma Bugden
BOOM BOOM: super beauty, super heroine 3D animation by
Sam Cuttriss, audio engineering by Allan Holdaway, Jeffrey
Holdaway. The artist wishes to acknowledge the assistance
of Creative New Zealand with this project.
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