f Defying the division of labour: Lee Wan and the Made-In series

This article examines the Korea-based artist Lee Wan (b. 1979) and his years-long Made-In series. Since 2012, Lee has travelled to Asian countries including Cambodia, Myanmar, Taiwan, Vietnam, Indonesia, Thailand and China. There Lee produced a tablespoon of sugar, three grams of gold, a pair of chopsticks, straw shoes, a wig, some silk, rice and batik that represented the country and videotaped the time-consuming, thorny process of manufacturing each item from scratch. Lee’s trip to former colonies, mostly South East Asian countries, and his ensuing sojourns there denote not only the spatial movement of visiting the home of each commodity, but also the time-travelling project of tracing the historical origin of an internationally consumed local product to the colonial period of the nineteenth century to the twentieth century. While mapping globalizing Asia through this larger, totalizing vision, Lee’s site-specific, self-assigned mission to create each country’s specialty results in dissecting the structure of a global economy that is intertwined with local politics. This essay articulates how Lee Wan’s thought-provoking performance, or, process art suggests an alternative way of living under a global market economy that has heavily depended on cheap labour, mass production, the dominant mode of exchange, and specialization. My reading illustrates the ways in which Lee’s work addresses a criticism of globalization partly by undoing the pre-existing division of labour and pursuing inefficiency amid the rapidly expanding transnational circulation of capital.