Outside the Korean Art Pavilion during the 2017 Venice Biennale, lee Wan and Choi Cody collaborated to represent Korea. The installations of the two artists were commissioned by the Korean Arts Commission and curated by the artistic director of the Hyndai Motor group, Lee Daehyung. The exhibition, called 'Counterbalance: The Stone And The Mountain', focuses on the conflicts and issues that the two artists perceive in modern Korean identity.

PROPER TIME Lee's installation called "Proper Time" and you are caught seeing the walls covered with clocks. They are all the same but on each one is written a different name, one year, a profession and a different country.
One wonders why and inevitably one thinks of fate, the passage of time, death. Through Proper Time Lee Wan is showing us, discreetly and abstractly, that in the end we are all part of something bigger: a history of individuals governed by global and supranational powers at the root of the economic and labor inequalities of our time.

UNIQUE AND INNOVATIVE Each clock is unique, isolated in this ticking multitude, just like individuals whose economic circumstances are engraved and shown to anyone visiting the pavilion, calculated with a mathematical formula specifically ingested by the artist; yet they are all assembled in the same room, taking advantage of every available inch. 'Proper time' doesn't talk about these issues.

In a much more pragmatic way, the artist wondered how many minutes a day he had to work to pay for food. And how much this time frame changes depending on the country in which you live, the profession and the age. Since this is the case, there are many variables and Lee Wan is a precise person so he decided to invent a mathematical formula to calculate it exactly. And he used it on a sample he personally examined.
To complete 'Proper time', it took 5 years in which he traveled to various countries and interviewed different people.

HOW TO CLASSIFY OUR TIME "Meals are universal needs that transcend borders, classes and religions," explains Lee Wan "i wanted to present the values of breakfast meals under different conditions (determined by GDP, culture, tradition, religion, wealth, differences in work and biological differences), and I wanted to quantify the time of each individual effort in terms of Einstein's time theory (…) And then I asked myself if it is also possible to assess one's life according to these economic norms."

FOR A BETTER TOMORROW In the center of the room that houses the 'Proper time' installation, the sculpture 'For a better Tomorrow' has been placed, which reproduces the classical iconography of propaganda images. But the characters are faceless and the work was made of plastic.
"My parents lived through the days of rebuilding and developing the country left in ruins by the Korean War (…) "For a better tomorrow", "Export is the only way out" and "Today's sweat is the happiness of tomorrow" are slogans of those times. The Korean government, then, promoted slogans and propaganda images that promised a better future as a result of hard work in the present. Time has passed, and now we live that future. But look at our country today."