The Art of Humiliation
By admin on 2015-01-14

"All artists are selfish," says the long-suffering widow of Ryu In, the famed Korean sculptor who drank himself to death 11 years ago at age 43.

In South Korea, the artist's sound-alike nickname is "Rodin," a tribute to the legendary sculptor whose rough bronzes broke the mold of traditional sculpture and inspired Ryu In's fractured vision of the human body.

Like Rose Beuret, the common law wife who tolerated Auguste Rodin's abuse and womanizing over the years, Lee In Hae sacrificed her own happiness for her husband's creativity.

"He needed me because he looked like a child and behaved like a child, always attracted to other women in search of a soul mate," she says. "I was never jealous, really. It was his passion I admired."

The widow in a black robe swivels her head around to survey a collection of her late husband's sculpture at T-Art Center in Beijing's 798 art district.

"He was an artist first, then a husband," she laments, with a sense of pride that she was able to endure for the sake of art his alcoholism and self-destructive bouts of depression.

The widow knew her husband was an alcoholic all the way back in their college days: "He was always sick and gasping for air." She believes it was a disease inherited from his father, also an artist and a drunkard. But she married him anyway.

"I was 19 and stupid. I believed I could cure him."

Instead, Lee In Hae appears to have spent much of her married life like a chambermaid cleaning up after a drunken orgy, often finding her husband unconscious, face down in a pool of his own vomit. Ryu In insisted he could only create at night, in a mind-altering haze of so ju, a white whiskey resembling vodka. The emotional darkness shows in his work.

His figurative torsos are disjointed, with perfectly sculpted arms and legs fused into machine parts. His work became more violent and mysterious as the artist sank deeper and deeper into depression. The disembodied arms and legs combining the erotic and the grotesque with a shocking visual power to keep the viewer entranced.

His final work is a visual death wish, created in the depths of depression: a bust with muscular arms chained to a tripod, the figure facing an open well in the earth.

Not surprisingly, collectors tend to be huge corporations and office tower designers, looking for a dramatic centerpiece in a building lobby. Nobody, it seems, can walk past one of these statues without stopping to try to figure it out.

In 1994, Ryu wrote of his confused emotions and the difficulties of clearing his mind: "Though I have made repeated misjudgments, I buried my sense of honor in the clay. Today, I absorb myself in the clay again and check the strength of my emotion."

Today, his widow says she still can't figure out the demons that battled inside her husband's brain. Despite the turbulence of their lives together, she is proud of his legacy. The sculptures sustain her life in Russia, where she now lives with her 22-year old daughter, a classical violin student in St. Petersburg.

Looking back, she feels the depth of emotion that went into her husband's work, quite different, she says, than today's "commercial" statuettes on sale at any gift shop.

"This work was from the heart," says the widow with no regrets. "We've lost that and it's what we need today."