LEE KAN KYO: The Last CD

The Last CD: Lee Kan Kyo’s Media Archaeology of the Future

By Wei Yu

Lee Kan Kyo’s practice re-produces the surplus imagery of contemporary capitalist society through labor-intensive and deliberately “clumsy” painting techniques. His subjects range from streaming stills and supermarket flyers to tabloid magazine covers. In recent years, his focus on contemporary “old media” has become a central trajectory in his work.

In his 2022 exhibition Lee Kan Kyo’s NFT, he began re-drawing DVD covers in a signature style, referencing the Japanese multimedia rental chain TSUTAYA with his project Bird’s Nest Video. For Lee, TSUTAYA—one of the few remaining DVD rental networks in Japan—functions as a kind of archaeological site of old media in the streaming era. The following year, his localized version Han-Chiang Video, presented at C-LAB Taiwan Contemporary Culture Lab, responded to the disappearance of Taiwan’s former rental chain Asia Video. His act of redrawing operates simultaneously as imitation, reproduction, adaptation, and a form of “aestheticized piracy,” re-materializing the hardware forms of DVD culture—its packaging, display systems, and storefront logic. This project establishes an unusual intertextual relationship between old and new media: to draw is to burn.

Following DVD-burning culture, Lee’s media-archaeological excavation turns to CDs. Introduced in the mid-1980s, CDs not only replaced analog formats such as vinyl and cassette tapes, but also revolutionized sound reproduction through digital sampling. In The Last CD, Lee continues his “aestheticized piracy” by excavating the culture of the mini single CD—a format particularly popular in Japan during the late 1980s and 1990s. Unlike the standard 12 cm CD, these 8 cm discs were packaged in elongated cases resembling tanzaku—narrow strips of paper used for writing wishes during Japanese festivals—hence the name “Tanzaku CD.” Though less widespread in Taiwan, they became prized collectibles among fans of Japanese pop culture.

Like DVDs, CDs declined earlier under the impact of MP3 and peer-to-peer file sharing technologies. The title The Last CD carries a double meaning: in Japanese, it can also imply “saving the best for last.” Lee’s project captures both the disappearance of an obsolete medium and a gesture of tribute.

From DVD to CD, Lee’s practice forms a distinct trajectory of media archaeology. Since its emergence in the 1980s, media archaeology has focused on obsolete, overlooked, or marginalized media technologies, emphasizing materiality, technical conditions, and non-linear histories. Rather than following a linear narrative, it investigates ruptures, residues, and forgotten forms as they re-emerge.

Lee’s artistic media archaeology reflects not only his personal memory as a millennial media consumer, but also an excavation of futures that have already passed. Once symbols of technological futurity—with their reflective metallic surfaces—these media formats now return as nostalgic artifacts within contemporary culture. This “outdated futurity” has become a distinct aesthetic sensibility, particularly among younger generations, evoking imagined histories and stylized temporalities.

His method of deliberate clumsiness resembles an amateur’s imitation of canonical imagery—yet the canon here consists entirely of mass-produced cultural products. In an age shaped by algorithm-driven content production, Lee’s re-drawn images introduce a subtle resistance, re-inscribing these cultural artifacts with ambiguity and affect.

What stands out in his work is its labor-intensive nature. Through repetitive, seemingly endless acts of reproduction, Lee generates a form of embodied production that transforms monotony into intensity. Echoing conceptual art practices of the 1970s—such as Tehching Hsieh’s phrase “using quantity to replace quality”—his work materializes repetition itself.

One example is his ongoing Juicebox Selfie project, in which he posts a daily selfie with a bottle of vegetable juice, accumulating over 2,800 images. In this process, Lee becomes not only an artist but also a performer of repetition, shifting the notion of artistic subjectivity toward a mode shaped by cultural production systems.

In this exhibition at TheCube Project Space, Lee transforms the gallery into a site resembling a record store, presenting hundreds of reconstructed CDs, including Japanese 8 cm singles and Taiwanese 12 cm albums, alongside “ghost versions” made from compressed or burned digital files. Situated in Gongguan—historically a district of secondhand record shops—the exhibition resonates deeply with the site’s local memory and cultural context.

Straddling the boundary between contemporary art and popular culture, Lee’s practice navigates between mass production and craft, materiality and memory, excavating both the physical and spectral remains of CD culture.