While experimenting with video media, which has often been used for the recording of performances, and using it in more active ways, Lee So-Mi was attracted to its potential for its variety of expression. Video media allowed her to overcome the immediacy and evanescence of performance and made a variety of experiments in image and sound possible through computer editing.
At her audition by Sonje Art Center in 1999, she presented A Boring Story of an Amateur Artist. This was a baby-faced character with the smile of the “smiley face.” To her, the performance was a kind of demonstration. The smile was not a natural one but was meant to ridicule Korean art circles and mass media for pursuing fads and peripheral pleasures.
Lee hopes that the smiley face is viewed as healthy and honest. She also hopes that it is conceived as a smile after sorrow, a smile of overcoming, and even a smile of emancipation at the end of meditation.
