As curators such as Stephanie Rosenthal and art historians such as Yeon Shim Chung have observed, Lee Bul's artwork is shaped by both her social-political context and her personal experiences.
Raised by politically active parents while her country was under the rule of Park Chung Hee, as a child Lee witnessed a dramatically changing society from its margins, where she and her family repeatedly uprooted and relocated.
[4] As curator Mami Kataoka writes, “With the country as a whole agonizing over what form their new society should take, it is not difficult to imagine Lee Bul wrestling with all manner of ideas [...] about the form society should take, doubts about and rejection of the military dictatorship, ideas about the reality of the social system, and the uncertain future.”[1] As Lee embarked on her own independent artistic practice, she rejected the overtly socialist realist and folk aesthetics of the Minjung artists while also pivoting sharply away from the cold, hard materials that founded her training in sculpture (namely, wood, stone, and metal).
[5] Her work received its first widespread international recognition with the series Majestic Splendor (1991), which was exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in 1997 and Harald Szeemann’s Lyon Biennale the following year.
[11] Lee roamed through public spaces in the multi-limbed soft sculpture, enacting performative interventions at sites such as airport gates, shrines, university campuses, and imperial palaces.
[11] Over the course of a two-hour long performance at the Dongsoong Art Center in Seoul, Lee hung upside down from a rock-climbing harness recounting the experience of an abortion interspersed with poetry, a parody of Christ on the cross, and references to pop songs.
[12] Exploring an extremely taboo subject in South Korea, the structure of Lee's performance “obscures the distinction between the private and the public, the personal and the political, the real and the contrived.”[12] Abortion did not have a pre-determined ending and finished when audience members could no longer bear to continue watching the artist writhe in physical pain.
[14] The installation features real dead fish decorated with sequins, beads, and other small, sparkly items, which are placed in plastic bags and pinned to the wall of the gallery in a grid pattern.
Through her Cyborg, and Anagram works, Lee Bul investigates the instability of human identity, the allure and dread of technological advancement, and the continuous quest for perfection beyond natural limitations.
In Lee's practice, cyborgs and monsters function as powerfully ambivalent metaphors; “ciphers of resistance against the traditional limitations of gender, feminism, race, science and politics.”[24] Live Forever is a multimedia installation first exhibited in 2001.
The work features futuristic spaceship-like karaoke capsules that, according to Wenny Teo, evoke the streamlined aesthetics of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey and create an intimate, isolated environment for the participant.
[27] In addition to the karaoke pods, Live Forever consisted of a new video work that was shot at the Tonga Room, a Tiki-themed lounge in the historic Fairmont Hotel in San Francisco.
As the curator Clara Kim notes, for those inside the pod, “the future and the past cross over.”[31] Initiated in 2005, the series Mon grand récit is a diverse collection of immersive installations, drawings, and sculptures that explore literary, philosophical, and architectural meditations on utopia and dystopia, state fiction, and social reality.
[33] These large-scale installations chronicle the dreamworlds and catastrophes of utopian desire using materials like glass, acrylic, polyurethane, steel and other metals, LED lights, chains, and cables.
Central to the series is a work entitled Weep into stones..., where luminous limestone formations, influenced by futuristic architectural visions, are juxtaposed with suspended grids and scaled-down replicas of iconic structures such as Vladimir Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International.
It suggests possibilities in a modernist scheme of things, a paradigm that overarches our 20th century, only to undermine them.”[36] Mon grand récit articulates a critical dialogue between past visions of progress and contemporary uncertainties, resonating with themes of transience and metamorphosis across cultural and historical landscapes.
[35] Some of the works from the series Aubade (2007), whose design recalls water and radio towers built by the Russian engineer and architect Vladimir Shukhov, include neon signs that spell out various terms related to utopian theories and modernization.
Bunker (M. Bakhtin) references Yi Gu, the last scion of the Joseon Dynasty, who was called back to Korea from a promising architectural career in New York by Park Chung-hee to rally popular support for his rule.
[46] In 1998, Lee was selected as one of six shortlisted artists, including Huang Yong Ping, William Kentridge, Pipilotti Rist, Lorna Simpson, and the winner, Douglas Gordon, for the Hugo Boss Prize.
Occupying the entire gallery, this exhibition includes documentation of early performances, sculptural works from the iconic Cyborg and Anagram series and recent immersive installations, as well as a selection of the artist's studio drawings.