TOKINARA

Rights Information
Year
2005
Reference
F87396
Media type
Moving image
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Rights Information
Year
2005
Reference
F87396
Media type
Moving image
Place of production
New Zealand/Aotearoa
Categories
Video Art
Credits
Unspecified: Hye Rim Lee

Screened in Viewfinder space 14 June - 27 June 2005

“‘TOKINARA’ opens with the virtual dreamscape of TOKI land where she transforms into a superhuman cyborg heroine of cyberspace. The dvd leads the audience through the journey of TOKI’S digital creation. It creates a fantasy dreamscape where the audience is drawn into the restless existence of the Toki character. TOKI exists somewhere between dream and fantasy between conscious and sub-conscious reality. ‘TOKINARA’ asks the audience to consider the boundaries between reality and fantasy i
n a world where more and more of us live in the virtual as much as the real. ‘TOKINARA’ is a remake version 2005 of multimedia performance ‘TOKILAND’ that was performed at St. James Theatre as a part of Interdigitate 2003.

“In Tokiland TOKI is mechanically cloned into an army, the lack of emotional facial expressiveness of the replicants, once read as passivity, when multiplied into the hundreds, like the ‘Smiths’ out of the Matrix, becomes stern and threatening. As we shoot past a multitude of assembly-line TOKI spawn we cut through them with our gaze but cannot harm them, as each figure has the capacity to recompose. Their interchangeablity is a comment on the way in which the power of ideal represses diversity in favour of homogeneity. “In her multiplication TOKI becomes menacing, revealing an inherent binarism between innocence and threat sublimated within the evolving poetics of beauty.” Encompassing both the desire to be desired and the will to be in control, Lee presents an awareness of the power of gender stereotypes whilst acknowledging that sexuality is a crucial dimension to life and identity. Lee does not separate sex from sexism, but a dialogue on both realities is present in the images she composes” Jaenine Parkinson, ‘Hye Rim Lee’, NZ Art Monthly, July - August 2004, www.nzartmonthly.co.nz

The background of TOKI:
My work explores the myriad and complex influences that contribute to any consideration of a migrant Korean’s identity. I use a return to adolescence as a metaphor to search for identity faced by a migrant’s experience in new cultural boundaries as an ‘alien Asian’. In 2002 my practice hinged around the evolution of my fictional character, TOKI (Korean for Bunny). TOKI’s existence is a restless one and her manifestations shift between animal, human, Cyborg and spirit form, as I attempt to locate my desires in the worlds of cyberspace, 3D computer modelling, Japanese animé, consumer merchandise and the fantasy world of dream. TOKI is the embodiment of a sense of fantasy, sensuality, and seduction with a touch of madness. She is a product of Western consumerism, Japanese pop culture, Korean tradition, femininity and feminism.

TOKI is a digital personification and through her I explore the position of Korean women in society. She is an avatar, the recipient of desires projected onto a graphic personification. She becomes a vehicle for fantasy exploration inherent in the video game. From her initial inception, TOKI has been destined to star in her own video game. The video game will be an alternative game that provokes questions involving relations between the body and technology, male and female, and inner and outer states. The game challenges boy game culture and creates new relations between images, bodies, identities, and artefacts through the media in relation to game girl culture.” Greg Burke, text for The Birth of TOKI: hundreds and thousands exhibition