Fragment

Field of Fragments represents the first exhibition showcasing Lee’s efforts to think with and through sand—a material that is rife with paradoxes. Sand is one of themost abundant materials on earth. Yet, after little more than a century of glass and concrete construction, and silicon-based digital technology, it has become a scarce commodity. Indeed, sand mining is driving armed conflict and environmental degradation worldwide, as documented in the 2013 film Sand Wars.

Sand is solid, but it often behaves like a liquid (as when it pours) or even as a gas (suspended aloft in sand storms). Sand is a plural noun, occurring in speech, as in the world itself, as an uncountable quantity. The Sorites paradox has puzzled philosophers since the 4th century BCE by asking how many grains must be adde or subtracted in order to proceed from a single grain of sand to a heap (soros). Today, this becomes an economic question, as artificial islands and beaches eroded by rising seas are ‘nourished’ with costly transplants of sand from offshore sea beds. Meanwhile, sand dunes encroach over ever larger territories under the pressures of desertification.

A collection of paradoxical sculptures marks the conceptual coordinates of Lee’s exhibition. Each represents an individual grain of sand made of the self-same material, enlarged more than 850 time to reveal its irreducible particularity, evoking the memories latent in their curves and crevasses. Contrary to what we migh imagine, sand grains are not tumbled smooth by friction over time, erasing the marks of past ecologies and geophysical processes. Rather, these features are what enable particular sand deposits, with distinctive grain shapes, mineral composition, and so forth, to form the physical, as well as digital, foundation of global infrastructures.

Carried from shore to shore, by ocean circulation currents, sand literally and figuratively represents the dialectic of universal and particular—'a world in a grain of sand,’ in the words of William Blake. And yet despite its intuitiveness, an enlarged grain of sand is a contradiction in terms because sand is defined, above all, by its size. Anything can become sand; today, beaches are strewn with particles of plastic and other synthetic materials that have eroded into grains within the range of approximately 0.06mm to 2.0mm. It is here that Lee’s minimalist aesthetic, featuring a consistently strict palette of naturalistic hues on the grey scale, now expanded to include the reddish, yellow and brown tones of sand, enables a flight of imagination to take place. As hyper-realistic reconstructions of sand grains, the sculptures offer a faint note of humor, relief from the mathematical sublimity bordering on horror of the Sorites paradox and the infinite task of counting. Under the pressure of the material’s own peculiar logic, they become surreal.These sculptural forms are the result of Lee’s intensive collaboration with the geometric researcher Phillip C. Reiner, whose studio protoCtrl - advanced geometries specializes in parametric investigations of artistic concepts. Reiner’s work focuses on the development of artistic ideas based on natural phenomena that are described by mathematical and physical principles. Together, they made a careful selection of sand grains collected from different geographical locations at which Lee works, taking into account physical and poetic considerations. Then, working with specialists from Carl Zeiss Industrielle Messtechnik GmbH, the selection of 0.3-1 mm grains of sand were scanned using an X-ray microscope. The scans were then processed into three-dimensional computer models, which would in turn become the basis for the sculptures. This process belies any simplistic understanding of scientific imaging as a direct reading of the book of nature. The data require extensive interpretation and translation in order to be used to create a physical form. Moving across multiple registers, from physical substrate to numerical information to 2D digital visualization, Lee and Reiner worked from the scans towards a new material expression subject to both technical and aesthetic constraints. One must understand an object’s geometry in order to bring it back into a physical form at another scale, and in another material medium. This is not a process that can be automated; to 3D print the sculptures out of sand involved negotiating the technical constraints of the printers, their size and resolution (the thickness the printed layers), the weight of the material and its binding agents. The largest sculptures were printed in several parts—fragments of fragments—and assembled into their completed forms. Their seamless mass and naturalistic color gradients reflect a combination of technical planning and handwork.With every shift in scale and media, grains of sand exhibit different parameters of interest: size, shape, color, mineral content, hardness, microscopic residues of smaller particles, and radioisotope signatures that reflect their points of origin. One of the most distinctive features of sand is that it constantly migrates, buffeted by waves, born along on wind and ocean currents, blown upwards and then sliding down the sides of wandering dunes. Sand is distinguished from dust and gravel precisely by its movement relative to that of air: dust tends to remain airborne, whereas sand grains suspended in air are heavy enough that they eventually precipitate out into heaps. Gravel, by contrast, is too heavy to be lifted by a gust of air. Regardless of its material composition or exact size, sand is characterized above all by how it moves through the world–a movement against which its fixationin concrete appears as futile protest. In a study of efforts to forestall desertification in China, anthropologist Jerry Zee describes how sand’s dynamics reconfigure political time, “Sand renders time into recursions. Remembering through sand in this way also constitutes a foretelling. As a material that moves, accretes, holds momentarily steady, or tends to dissolution, it draws together past and future burials.”[2] As in an hourglass, to stop sand is to stop time. Its temporary fixation in architecture, or sculpture, represents a snap-shot on sand’s ineluctable journey.

Text: Dehlia Hannah