James S. Lee

‘There Goes Another Ideological God…’ ‘We lack resistance. We lack creation’– Gilles Deleuze  

My practice this year has centred around how political resistance may actualise itself within an art practice. Through art we may invent, experiment and develop new ways to resist against normative thinking prevalent and pervasive in all aspects of a society subsumed under capitalism. Resistance is the means to imagine a world beyond the confines of our own ideological status quo, to re-imagine and dare ourselves to think about our present once again. Art can bring us to resist accepting the ways things are as an inevitable reality; all things made by men can be modified, changed or radically altered. Resistance in art gives us the offer to begin engaging, questioning and -most importantly- thinking critically again.

My practice this semester has involved sculpture, paper making, artist’s books and film, which usually overlap and begin to inform each other through the making process.

Conceptually, my work this year has dealt with the idea of political resistance: that through an engagement between artist and audience, through the display or making public of an art work, an engagement may happen which invites the viewer to begin a critical process, that art may become the ‘site’ of an event for the subject.[1] This ‘event’ allows the viewer to look at the world in new and previously unimagined ways. In short, art can challenge us to re-think our relationship with the world; to challenge the viewer into to re-imagining that which is presented as something that should be taken for granted.

It is on this criteria of engagement that I may investigate the idea of how art may become a ‘site of resistance’: through art we may invent, experiment with and develop new ways to protest and resist against normative thinking prevalent and pervasive in all aspects of a society subsumed under capitalism.

[1] The idea of an ‘Event’ relates to a rupture in the subject’s reality and allows for a re-evaluation of truth. The term is referent of Alain Badiou and his book ‘Being and Event’ which takes around 1000 pages to explore what is, in effect, a very simple concept! 

Prior to the degree show, for months I collected fast food packaging, banking application forms and promotional material. These nave been resisted by being pulped; being remade into books or large blank sheets of paper. It is an act of resistance through re-appropriation.