LEE KAN KYO: The Last CD

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

Text | Yu Wei

Track 1

Lee Kan Kyo’s practice re-produces the surplus imagery of contemporary capitalist society through labour-intensive, deliberately clumsy painting techniques—from streaming drama stills and supermarket flyers to tabloid magazine covers. In recent years, his sustained engagement with contemporary “old media” has become a defining thread running through his work.

In his 2022 exhibition Lee Kan Kyo’s NFT—which had nothing to do with NFTs—he began rendering DVD covers in his signature style, borrowing the name of the Japanese multimedia rental chain TSUTAYA (蔦屋) for his series Bird’s Nest Video. As one of the last remaining DVD rental outlets in Japan, TSUTAYA struck the artist as something like an archaeological ruin of audiovisual media in the streaming age. The following year, Han-Chiang Video, presented at C-LAB Taiwan Contemporary Culture Lab, applied the same approach to Asia Video—a Taiwanese rental chain that had quietly shuttered years earlier, unable to survive the streaming tide.

Working in a style that hovers between imitation and adaptation—and, within the logic of audiovisual publishing, something close to aestheticized piracy—Lee re-produced the material culture of DVD in its entirety: content, medium, packaging, distribution, and display. All of this amounts to both a salvage operation on media ruins and an unorthodox tribute to the culture of DVD burning.

Track 2

Having excavated DVD, Lee now turns to a new site: the CD. Introduced in the mid-1980s, the CD transformed music consumption—replacing the analog warmth of vinyl and cassette with digital sampling, and driving a far-reaching technological revolution in the music industry. Lee still remembers his first CD: Michael Jackson’s Dangerous.

In The Last CD, Lee applies the same piracy logic to the culture of 1990s music CDs, and in particular the mini single CD endemic to that era’s peak. These 8 cm discs were especially popular in Japan from the late 1980s through the 1990s, and appeared in Taiwan’s record market of the same period as well—never quite achieving the same cultural momentum, but cherished as collectibles by a small contingent of Japanese pop devotees, and marking a distinctly local cultural object shaped by the broader sweep of Japanese popular culture through Taiwan at the time.

CDs were dealt an earlier blow than DVDs in the streaming age: as far back as the late 1990s, the rise of MP3 and peer-to-peer file-sharing—propelled by Winamp and Napster—offered cash-strapped young music fans a dream alternative. The internet promised a nomadic, shared, decentralized, dematerialized experience of music, dismantling not only the physical substrate of the CD but the very concept of the album. In recent years, however, thanks to cultural nostalgia and the K-pop economy, that mirror-finish disc sealed in a clear plastic case has staged something of a comeback among youth culture—though what matters now is often less the audio itself than the photocards and limited-edition inserts inside.

Track 3

Having lived through the full arc of 1990s CD culture, Lee approaches this exhibition as a kind of confessional ode. The title The Last CD carries a double meaning: beyond its literal sense, the Japanese word saigo (最後) also implies saving the best, the most treasured, for last. In naming the series thus, Lee captures both the twilight of an obsolete medium and a gesture of homage.

From DVD to CD, Lee’s body of work traces a coherent trajectory of personal media archaeology. What it excavates is not only his memories as a millennial audiovisual enthusiast, but also the futures that have already become the past. At the moment of their release, both formats carried an ineffable sense of the future—their mirrored metallic surfaces registering something almost impossible to name in material and visual terms. In the post-internet age, that “outdated futurity” has been absorbed into a new culture of nostalgia: the gleaming laser-etched disc, once a promise of the future, now returns in the guise of the vintage. Lee’s practice is, among other things, a visual response to this anachronistic return.

At the level of visual method, Lee’s deliberate clumsiness—his purposefully off-kilter re-drawing—resembles an amateur’s imitation of canonical imagery. Yet the “canon” here consists entirely of mass-cultural products: standardized, formulaic, engineered to package a consumer’s emotional experience wholesale and deliver it—preemptively—before reflection can intervene, whether in streaming dramas, films, or pop music. In today’s algorithmically optimized streaming environment, the culture industry targets individual taste with ever greater precision. Against this, Lee’s clumsy copies of cultural products generate images of unexpected weight.

Post-postmodernism, appropriation, re-production, homage, and pastiche have become familiar moves—easily metabolized by contemporary audiences. What stands out in Lee’s work is something else: a labour-intensive mode of art-making in which the act of copying is kept deliberately plain, monotonous, and stripped of expressive agency. In the seemingly endless accumulation of these repetitive gestures, something like an embodied productivity emerges.

Track 4

In contemporary life, repetition tends to breed boredom. Lee’s repetitive practice, however, is not self-depleting—it generates a particular kind of intensity through the sheer volume of sensory production. That intensity lends an almost exhilarating physical charge to otherwise mundane action, touching, in some measure, the legacy of 1970s Conceptual Art—calling to mind Tehching Hsieh’s inscription on the wall of his New York studio: “use quantity to replace quality.” The same intensity makes Lee look, in equal measure, like an obsessive fan—one who responds to the objects of his devotion through relentless, prolific output.

The clearest illustration of this is his ongoing Juicebox Selfie project. Aligning the temporal logic of a bottle of sugar-free vegetable juice—marketed as supplying {one full day’s worth of nutrients”—with his own lived daily image, he posts a selfie each day on his Instagram account “Lee Kan Kyo’s Juice Selfie,” accumulating over 2,800 images to date. Here, Lee is not only an artist but a performer of repetition: the traditionally constituted creative subject is displaced, reconstituted as a product of the culture industry.

This repetitive logic finds its most vivid instantiation in the exhibition through Lee’s version of Mariah Carey’s Christmas album. Like a cultural ritual inseparable from both sweetness and suffering, we are every year inevitably reacquainted with the advent of Christmas through the opening notes of All I Want for Christmas Is You—in films, on the radio, in advertisements, in supermarkets.

Carey has declared that she refuses the concept of time; instead, she chooses to live moment to moment. This refusal has become a recurring trope in her meme-ified public persona: her album’s 25th anniversary was reframed as “25 minutes”; in the #tenyearchallenge, she posted the same photograph twice, rejecting the very premise of a decade’s passage. She draws her fans into an eternal recurrence—a parallel universe of perpetual return. Lee is, in fact, a devoted Carey fan, and his practice carries a similar temporal refusal: in the always-identical form of the daily juice selfie, meaningless routine accumulates across thousands of iterations until it hardens into something like a permanent persona.

Track 5

For The Last CD at TheCube Project Space, Lee transforms the gallery into a space that recalls a record shop, presenting hundreds of artistically re-produced CDs: primarily Japanese 8 cm mini singles and Taiwanese 12 cm releases, alongside “ghost versions” made from digitally compressed and burned degraded audio files.

The Gongguan neighbourhood where TheCube is located has long been, and remains, a gathering point for record shops: from the early days of Cosmo City, Paidi (派地) and Sha’ou (沙鷗) through the chain-store era of Rose Records and Eslite Music, to the still-standing stalwarts of indimusic records, Mollie’s Used Books, and, extending toward Guting, White Rabbit Records and Rotten Blues. The exhibition thus resonates, in no small measure, with the genius loci of the site itself.

Lee Kan Kyo’s trajectory in recent years moves quietly along the border between contemporary art and popular culture. His personal media archaeology excavates not only the ghosts and relics of 1990s CD culture, but offers a bodily response to futures that have already receded into the past. In the accumulation of countless repetitive strokes, those mass-produced, formulaic cultural objects—long stripped of their aura—unexpectedly recover a kind of weight.