Hyungkoo Lee

Anas Animatus

Photohgraph: Courtesy Of Arario Gallery, New York

Cartoon characters, especially Japanese anime, have taken over Asian imaginations. Korean-born, Yale-educated artist Hyungkoo Lee literally dissects this phenomenon with sculptures and drawings that put American-animation icons on the operating table.

In this exhibition, expertly fashioned skeletons of Donald Duck, Bugs Bunny, Tom and Jerry, and others haunt the gallery, which has been redesigned with dark walls and spotlights—like a creepy hallway in the Museum of Natural History. In one room, Canis Latrans Animatus (2006), a.k.a. Wile E. Coyote, runs after Geococcyx Animatus (2005–6), a.k.a. Road Runner, a pair of boney protagonists caught in the middle of a chase. These are not replicas of the skeletal structures of the actual animals that inspired these characters. Instead, the artist has made biomorphic forms—elongated noses, oversize feet, scary front teeth—that would have been the bones of these cartoon figures if they had ever actually been alive.

The drawings accompanying this exhibition further the feeling of a mad scientist at work. B11 (2006), created with colored pencil and Wite-Out on black paper, shows Mickey Mouse as a three-dimensional cutaway with his eye sockets and brains exposed. The final room of the exhibition houses a full-scale lab worthy of Elmer Fudd. Displayed behind glass, like a Damien Hirst vitrine, we see the fabrication process for these unnatural science projects from charts on the walls to a half-finished model laying across a steel tabletop. The effect is far too clever to be a pretentious meditation on mortality. Instead, in this artist’s hands, the skeletons come alive, making the cartoon characters seem all the more real.

—Barbara Pollack