Lee Bul weaves personal narrative into biting social critique, historical references and exploration of utopian ideals, earning her broad international recognition. Themes of her sculptures, installations and performances, appearing grotesque and ghastly but overwhelming and majestic at the same time, have included the marginalization of women and technology’s potential.
“Willing To Be Vulnerable – Metalized Balloon V3.” 2015–2019. Nylon taffeta cloth, polyester with aluminum foil, fan, electronic wiring, polycarbonate mirror. 230 × 1000 × 230 cm. Installation view at “Encounters” sector, 2019 Art Basel Hong Kong. Courtesy of Studio Lee Bul and Lehmann Maupin, PKM Gallery, Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac
International recognition of the multifaceted Lee Bul remains unwavering. Lee’s most prominent project in 2019 was at the 58th Venice Biennale. It marked the first time a Korean artist has participated twice in the main exhibition. In 1999, she was the principal artist featured in the Korean Pavilion and was awarded an honorable mention. Both awe and appreciation of her thought-provoking critique and seemingly boundless creative energy have earned her global attention.
Also in 2019, Art Basel Hong Kong, the biggest art fair in Asia, invited Lee in March to showcase a silver zeppelin hanging from the ceiling at the ground floor entrance of the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre. The colossal installation was immensely popular with visitors, who eagerly photographed themselves with it, reportedly the inspiration for the theme of the show, “Still We Rise.”The zeppelin, titled “Willing To Be Vulnerable – Metalized Balloon,” also appeared in London, in a special exhibition at the Hayward Gallery, during its 50th anniversary celebration in 2018. The exhibition, “Lee Bul: Crashing,” was a large-scale retrospective that included some 100 works spanning three decades, starting in the late 1980s. The retrospective continued at Martin-Gropius-Bau in Berlin under the title “Lee Bul: Crash,” which ran from September 2018 to January 2019.
I first encountered Lee’s work in the late 1990s. A fashion magazine had a double-page photograph of a woman wearing a bodysuit with three baby doll heads attached, fishnet stockings, silk robe, leather boots, and bead ornaments dangling from her head. The sight was bizarre, but sensual and funny. And the woman was Lee herself. The photograph was used in what became one of her representative works, “Hydra: Monument.” Referencing the multi-headed water monster of Greek mythology, Lee infused cultural elements of the East and West and oriental fantasy. The powerful image fiercely challenged the stereotype of Asian women being docile.
“Hydra II (Monument).” 1999. Photo print on vinyl, air pumps. 1200 × 700 × 600 cm. Installation view at “Hot Air,” Shizuoka Convention & Arts Center Granship, Shizuoka, Japan.Photo by Yasunori Tanioka, Courtesy of Nanjo and Associates
Radical and Innovative
Another provocative presentation, “Majestic Splendor,” at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York in 1997, d quite a sensation, solidifying Lee’s presence in the international art scene. It consisted of slowly rotting raw fish adorned with bead flowers — and suffocating stench. The smell caused the fish to be removed just before the opening of a famous American artist’s exhibition on the floor above. The next year, Lee was selected as a finalist for the Hugo Boss Prize awarded by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.
“Majestic Splendor” was not displayed again until 2016, when it was red for the “Connect 1: Still Acts” exhibit held at the Art Sonje Center in Seoul. I was beguiled by the work’s combination of the provocativeness of postmodern art and the deep roots of Eastern and Western art traditions. The concept of decomposing fish decorated with dazzling bead flowers shared a common thread with vanitas still life paintings produced in Europe during the 17th century, as well as kusōzu, or the pictures of the nine stages of a decaying body, in Japanese art. Vanitas commonly feature symbols of wealth, such as luxury items, with symbols of death or ephemerality, such as skulls, candles, or hourglasses, which signify the futility of material goods and the brevity of life. Portraying the nine stages of the decomposition of a woman’s corpse, kusōzu also illustrate the transient nature of earthly existence.
“Majestic Splendor” left such a powerful impression because the decomposition of the fish and its foul smell was brought inside MoMA, a virtual shrine. The putrid odor was the true essence of the work.
Lee explains that she was inspired to use bead flowers by her childhood memories of her mother ing beads. Born in 1964, Lee grew up in an era of military dictatorship and rapid economic ascension. Her parents were political dissidents; hence, the family was forced to lead a mostly itinerant life. They had to work from home to earn a living, making things like beaded handbags.
Underlying Lee’s work up until the 2000s was a desperate attempt to shatter preconceptions and old notions related to her identities as a woman and Asian. The human body was her principal medium. The sculpture series “Monster” (1998) featured tentacle creatures with a soft flesh-like texture and a shape that appeared to be a hybrid of animals and plants — the human body, octopuses, sea anemones, ginseng roots, etc. The impression is highly sensuous and seductive, yet also repulsive.
From left: “Cyborg W1.” 1998. Cast silicone, polyurethane filling, paint pigment. 185 × 56 × 58 cm; “Monster: Pink.” 1998. Fabric, fiber filling, stainless steel frame, acrylic paint. 210 × 210 × 180 cm; “Cyborg W2.” 1998. Cast silicone, polyurethane filling, paint pigment. 185 × 74 × 58 cm; “Cyborg W4.” 1998. Cast silicone, polyurethane filling, paint pigment. 188 × 60 × 50 cm.Installation view at “Lee Bul,” Art Sonje Center, Seoul.
Photo by Rhee Jae-yong, Courtesy of Art Sonje Center.
Hybrid Blurring Boundaries
The sculptures were a variant of a monster costume Lee wore for a 12-day outdoor performance in 1990, titled “Sorry for suffering — You think I’m a puppy on a picnic?” Lee walked the streets of Tokyo dressed in a monstrous bodysuit, a soft wearable sculpture with dangling limbs and tentacles, all covered in red and white skin that resembled raw meat. It was a scathing critique of the conventional dichotomy between human and monster, reason and sensibility, man and woman.
The “Cyborg” sculpture series (1997–2011), which also featured anthropomorphic figures, continued this theme. It was displayed alongside the “Monster” series during Lee’s retrospectives in London and Berlin. With a wasp waist and prominent breasts and buttocks, the shape of the female robotic figures in the series resembled the sexualized characters in Japanese anime. The pure white, goddess-like figures also recalled ancient Greek sculptures, but they were imperfect, hanging from the ceiling missing a head, arm and leg.
Lee drew inspiration for the series from “A Cyborg Manifesto” (1985), a famous essay written by American biologist and feminist science philosopher Donna Haraway. Short for cybernetic organism, a cyborg is a fusion of machine and organism. In contrast to the dystopian worldview of most science fiction movies, Haraway views the cyborg identity in a positive light. Her explanation is that the concept of the cyborg allows us to expand our sensibilities, dismantling the discriminatory boundaries and divisions of gender and race, and build a new politics. She also contends that the direction feminist politics should pursue is rebuilding the conventional boundaries that we encounter in our daily lives through cyborgian coalition and affinity, and ends the essay with the famous line, “I would rather be a cyborg than a goddess.”
The tentacle-laden monster costume that Lee donned for her street performance was an amalgam that blurred boundaries, and in a broader sense, a representation of cyborgian identity.
Armed with extraordinary social and historical insight, Lee Bul has developed a distinctive artistic style that has earned her global recognition as one of the most prominent artists of her time.Photo by Le Pan, Courtesy of Studio Lee Bul
A unique juxtaposition of beauty and horror,
weakness and strength runs throughout her works. They do not suggest a defeatist attitude,
but rather stand for the coexistence of continued hope and despair.
“Majestic Splendor” (detail). 1997. Fish, sequins, potassium permanganate, mylar bags.Photo by Robert Puglisi, Courtesy of Studio Lee Bul
Reflections on Eras
From her exploration of the themes of social oppression and the human body through the cyborg and monster sculptures, Lee began to show a notable shift in the ongoing series, “Mon Grand Récit” (2015– ). It includes large-scale models of landmark modernist structures of the early 20th century that represented the pursuit of utopia. But the setting for them is a desolate dystopian landscape; Lee aims to convey dashed hopes for a utopian future.
In this series, Lee weaves her personal narrative into Korea’s social landscape that has undergone tumultuous transitions. She reflects on history and the times, noting the words of the French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard who expressed skepticism and incredulity toward “grand or meta narratives” of the modernist age.
Ostensibly, the “Mon Grand Récit” series marks a departure from Lee’s earlier works up until the early 2000s, most notably the “Cyborg” series. However, there is an inextricable connection in their central theme — the frustrated hopes of harnessing the power of technology to overcome human limitations and contradictions, and ultimately realize a utopian world. As Stephanie Rosenthal, curator of Lee’s London and Berlin retrospectives, pointed out, a unique juxtaposition of beauty and horror, weakness and strength runs throughout her works. They do not suggest a defeat-ist attitude, but rather stand for the coexistence of continued hope and despair.
한국국제교류재단
