Art Metropole

09 - 23 May 2023

A Transition from Old to New: 'What Are Our Supports?' Artist Statement by Andrew Lee

Andrew Yong Hoon Lee – a Brooklyn-based artist who works in moving image, sound, drawing and sculpture – is a contributing artist in What Are Our Supports?, a new anthology of over 20 local and international contributors that looks to the immaterial and relational supports that are crucial to the survival of our commons during times of precarity. For this project, Lee created The People’s Salon in collaboration with Khan Lee and Francis Cruz.

“The People’s Salon was an experiment in the constraints and limitations of publicness and the expansion of interiority, self-image, public image, sound and care that utilized Germaine Koh’s structure, HMH Boothy, as a space for our artist-in-residence Francis Cruz to provide complementary haircuts to the public for 4 days in June of 2018. The project culminated in a performative experiment where the booth became a sound stage, and the sitter and the audience experienced a light and sound performance that Khan Lee and myself performed while the sitter was simultaneously getting their haircut.

In a sense, it was like how one might experience any other haircut in a salon, where you’re gossiping with your hairstylist, or you’re being philosophical while there’s music playing in the background – but this situation is put into a strange relief by bringing this encounter into an open and public space. So the sitter, the audience and the facilitators are all kind of producing this experience in concert.

Something that became really apparent was taking something a bit ceremonial and private into a more public space, and seeing what that produces. I think of the haircut as a kind of molting of the skin – like a crab which is extremely vulnerable when molting its shell. At the salon, you have these weird clips in your hair, you have tin foil hanging from your head, you might be wearing an apron, or reading a trashy magazine. You accept your state as something that is a transition from old to new. This space is mediated with a sense of trust with your hair stylist. By recontextualizing the experience in a public space, this requires a different type of exchange and I think that those dynamics are heightened and sped up. So you have a stranger coming to your booth – you’re also cutting without a mirror – and this person getting their haircut is entrusting a complete stranger to cut their hair. In facilitating this activity in public space, I think that the only way to actually experience something like care was to produce it. And that’s what I really came away with at the end of the project.”

Learn more about the book What Are Our Supports? and purchase it here.

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The People’s Salon.

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