Lee Bul (b. 1964, Korea) grew up in Seoul and received a BFA in sculpture from Hongik University. Considered one of the leading Korean artists of her generation, she has achieved international recognition for her formally inventive, intellectually provocative oeuvre. Demonstrating virtuosity across diverse media—from drawing and performance to sculpture, painting, installation and video—her multifaceted production is representative of the most innovative aesthetic currents shaping contemporary art in the global sphere.
Lee Bul’s work has been featured in solo presentations at museums throughout the world, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York (1997); Kunsthalle Bern, Switzerland (1999); Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philadelphia (2001); MAC, Musée d’Art Contemporain, Marseille (2002); the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York (2002); Le Consortium, Dijon (2002); Japan Foundation, Tokyo (2003); The Power Plant, Toronto (2003); Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney (2004); Domus Artium, Salamanca (2007); Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, Paris (2007–08); Mori Art Museum, Tokyo (2012); MUDAM - Musée d'Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean, Luxembourg (2013-14); and most recently at the Ikon Gallery, Birmingham (2014). Forthcoming exhibitions will take place at the Espai d'art contemporani de Castelló, Spain (2015) and Musée d'art moderne de Saint-Etienne, France (2015). She has also participated in major group exhibitions around the world, and in 1999, she was awarded an Honorable Mention at the 48th Venice Biennale for her contribution to both the Korean Pavilion and the international exhibition curated by Harald Szeemann. The artist currently lives and works in Seoul, Korea.
From here: http://www.lehmannmaupin.com/artists/lee-bul
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Nothing's perfect, but that doesn't stop us chasing the dream – a Catch-22 that has long fascinated Korean artist Lee Bul. In the 1990s, her cyborg sculptures took an obsession with prosthetics and plastic surgery to a gleaming conclusion: ideal robot women. More recently, she's turned to the futuristic architectural fantasies of the early 20th century. Elaborate sculptures and installations are crafted from twisted metal, decked in crystal beads and chains, set in mirrored boxes or hung from the ceiling like castles in the air. Hectic and gorgeous, they suggest another kind of post-human world, where shimmering modernist buildings lie in seductive ruin.
Bul was born in 1964 in a remote South Korean village where her dissident parents were in hiding from the oppressive government. Something of a renegade in the Korean artworld, she made her mark in the late 1980s through outlandish street performances. Her first sculptures were designed to be worn: covered in freakish protrusions and decked in sequins, they suggested a metamorphosis that was both grotesque and sensual. In the late 1990s her sci-fi inspired, mutant cyber-women, with missing heads and limbs like the female torsos of Renaissance sculpture, established Bul's international reputation. As with the cyberpunk novels of William Gibson, her work pointed to a terrifying future where technology is less freeing than debilitating.
The past five years have seen Bul make a break with this aesthetic, though beauty gone mad remains an abiding theme. Her 2007 series, Sternbau , was inspired by visionary architect Bruno Taut's proposals for a crystalline city in the Alps, which date from 1917; darkly sparkling, chandelier-like hanging sculptures sprawl outwards, laden with out-of-control décor. An installation from the same year, Heaven and Earth, explores her own country's embattled modernisation: in a scruffy, white-tiled bathroom resembling a torture chamber, a bath is filled to the brim with foul-smelling black goop. Reflected in this well of horrors is an ice-white sculpture of Baekdu mountain, the mythical birthplace of the Korean nation. Luxurious and sinister, Bul's art mines a terrible beauty that seems to stretch endlessly into past and future, grimly dehumanising and forever compelling.
Taken from/continued here: http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2010/jul/21/artist-week-lee-bul
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Like a lighthouse perched on seaweed-covered rocks, a temple stands on a landscape of black hair, atop a structure that is taller than I am. The whorls and skeins of hair form a canopy over the wall of an ancient building that is pierced by empty windows. Beyond the wall is another landscape of undulating hills, with a writhing highway whose multiple exits go nowhere. With me so far? It is confusing. The entire structure stands on a concrete pillar set on to a rock at its base. The rock is impregnated with large crystals that seem to have grown there.
Is Lee Bul’s Excavation, 2007 a model of a place, or an image of a body – the spirit up there in the temple, the comings and goings of the highway like speech or thoughts, the lower functions rooting us to the earth?
There is an awful lot of fabrication and jiggery-pokery in Lee Bul’s constructed worlds. But there are no people, even though a few figurines, like the ones that populate model railway sets, would add a sense of human scale.
In another model that looks like a towering mountain of petrified goo, a pylon flashes an illuminated sign that reads Weep Into Stones … Fables Like Snow … Our Few Evil Days. The phrases come from Hydriotaphia, a meditation on mortality by the 17th-century English writer Thomas Browne, which inspired WG Sebald’s tour of East Anglia in his novel The Rings of Saturn.
Here, Browne’s words illuminate a psychological terrain that has its roots in South Korea, where Lee lives and works. Elsewhere in her Mon grand récit: Weep into stones … is a scale model of the studio she occupied in Seoul in the late 1980s. It was on the top floor of an abandoned tower block, the typical remorselessly utilitarian architecture of a country under a military dictatorship. Her idiosyncratic art resists the conformity of the culture she grew up in, and constantly returns to the idea of a failed utopia, dreams of a better future and the ruins of the past.
It also revels in its own excess. Or rather, she points out both the plenitude and complexity of the world – and our inability to control it all. So it is with her work. Sometimes dark and doomy, frequently decorative and definitely strange, Lee fills two floors of the Ikon in Birmingham with sculptures and maquettes, installations and drawings. One work is a maze of screens and mirrors, culminating in a chamber of infinite reflections and bright lights, your own shadow disappearing in a vortex. This is fun, but infinity mirrors are such a cliche.
The exterior walls of this maze have been papered with pages, in English and Korean, from American psychologist Julian Jaynes’s The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. You can only read fragments – the pages are disordered, pasted upside-down and semi-obscured by deliberate stains.
Lee’s references add heft to what she does, and help her work come alive, but they don’t always make it better. I get lost among all the ramifications in her more complicated works. Look – there is a tiny jade-green model of Tatlin’s Tower, no bigger than a peanut! And here are dozens of drawings. The best are those with pendulous bulges and pouches, their phallic and breast-like and shoe-like forms. They remind me of the early drawings of Eva Hesse, and their almost human forms provide relief.
Elsewhere Lee has installed “cyborg” creatures and sculptures of vomiting dogs. These had yet to be unleashed on my visit, which is a pity. I do like a vomiting dog. Twinkling lights, more infinity mirrors, and a tunnel that’s mirrored on the inside and like a ramshackle shanty on the outside, through which you can stoop and crawl, give her show a kind of fairground liveliness. There is so much going on everywhere that the whole exhibition becomes an obstacle course. There is no let-up, and after an hour or two, you wonder if there is any way out.
Taken from/continued here: http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2014/sep/11/lee-bul-review-techno-terror-sculpture-south-korea-ikon
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Monster: Pink
1998 / 2011
The monstrous and phantasmic bodysuits she wore during those performances eventually developed into sculptural artworks such as Monster: Pink in their own right. Through various sculpture series including “Cyborg,” “Anagram,” and “Live Forever,” Lee investigated the limits of human desire, ideals and potential.
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Untitled (infinity wall) 2008
In the “Untitled (infinity)” series, which is fixed to walls or the floor of the gallery, Lee uses mirrors to create illusions in which oddly shaped objects resembling fragments of architectural models appear to continue endlessly into the distance. Thus the desire for immortality, which was apparent in “Live Forever,” is here transferred to the spatial concept of infinity.
Chrysalis 2000
The works in the “Anagram” series, which takes its name from the English term for changing the order of letters in a word to make a new word, consist of various parts that are joined together interchangeably with the result that their appearance reminds us of plants or insects. Many references to literature can also be found in the works. For example, the work Chrysalis refers to a stage in a moth or butterfly's development, but one may recall at the post-apocalyptic world found in John Wyndham's science fiction novel The Chrysalids (1955), in which society attempts to eradicate animals and plants made mutant by exposure to radioactivity and humans who do not conform to strict norms.
Sternbau No. 4 2007
In 1919, the German architect and urban planner Bruno Taut, who is best known for works such as his Glass Pavilion (1914), became inspired by the fantasy novelist Paul Scheerbart's essays on Glasarchitektur (Glass Architecture)(1914) and thus developed what he called Alpine Architecture(1919), in which buildings are giant artworks arranged in mountains as a kind of ornamentation. His ideas of Sternbau, which glitters like a star or a glass building reflecting the sunlight, resonate with Lee Bul's ideas of an ideal society, a fantasy landscape. It also reflects the notion of the incompleteness of utopian architecture theories. Several of Lee's “Mon grand récit” works thus suggest the influence of such.
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Bunker (M. Bakhtin) 2007
Bunker (M. Bakhtin), which looks like a black rocky mountain, has a cave-like interior that can be entered through a large fissure. The invisible key to this work is the ghost of Yi Gu, the man who was born as the heir to the Korean Imperial family and died in 2005. Lee Bul is fascinated by the dramatic life Yi led in the shadows of the modern development that occurred under Park Chung-hee's military dictatorship. Inside the cave, Lee juxtaposes the sounds of the visitors' footsteps with vibrations from locations that had significance in Yi's life. In this way, she creates an amalgam of history and Yi's memory with contemporary times.
Taken from/continued here: http://www.mori.art.museum/english/contents/leebul/introduction/
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Lee Bul’s Official website: http://www.leebul.com/
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p.s. Hey. The honorable Thomas Moronic leads us through the weekend on the coat tails of the work of the very interesting artist Lee Bul, and I strongly suspect that even a minimal exploration of his post and her work will intrigue and pleasure you up enough to get you to Monday with flying colors and all of that. Enjoy, and thank you mightily, Thomas! ** Hyemin K, Hi. Yeah, it's a pretty weird and racy book for libraries, I would suspect. I dig about the non-interview, and I like the idea of me being distanced to the point 'dead' in your writings about me. Okay, whatever you think is best for you and your style re: NYC is definitely the best. ** Jeffrey Coleman, Hi. Oh, that would have been interesting to do a switch out and illustrate those deceased people's birthplaces instead, although it might have been a lot harder to find photos of wherever those places were, I guess. Weird, Swans are playing here tonight. It's sold out, so I'm not going. I do remember you telling about that guy from high school whom you lost track of then found again. Well, given your history with him, it's no surprise that his silence would make you worry about and imagine the worst that could have happened. That has happened to me a bunch of times. I'm a worrier. In my cases, it always turned out to be something simple and to do only with their issues and not about me, if that makes any difference. I kind of vaguely remember Antonio posting about that band here, but it's a very vague memory, and I have no idea when it would have happened, and Blogger doesn't have a sophisticated enough comments search engine to help. But that was an amazing story, and really intriguingly told. Thank you, Jeff. ** David Ehrenstein, Hi. That Ira Sachs video looks intense and disturbing/ depressing, so of course I'll watch it. ** Tosh Berman, Hi, Tosh. No, I didn't notice anything about those locations actually being tagged as haunted. I guess I was hoping to implant the ghosts or something. Thank you! ** Empty Frame, Wow, thank you a lot, man. Yeah, I felt particularly pleased/ proud of that post, I must admit, Thank you! The gif obsession is deep one. I haven't quite figured it out, but there's just something about them, their limitations and little magic and their poetic and stuff that kind of drives me crazy in the good way. But, yeah, poor anyone reading this blog without a super computer. Mine is no super computer at all, and the internet signal here at the Recollects sucks, so if loading those posts feels like building a pyramid, at least making them is like that too. Yeah, really nice, totally, about the face/ architecture juxtaposition thing. If you didn't find the answers to those questions, I can fill you in. You know, I think I hadn't seen George Shaw's paintings until I googled his name just now. They do look really haunting and strong. Thank you for that, and, yeah, again, for your very kind words. Excellent weekend! ** Keaton, Hi, K. Thank you, man. I wrote a poem about Brandis's death. There was a weird power there. The 'writing it' part is the part that sucks. But needs to be. I wish my imagination was Cape Canaveral and paper was Mars. I need a good desk too, or an infinitely less cluttered one. Love back. ** Thomas Moronic, Thank you again so very much for our weekend's enlightenment/ entertainment combo. And thanks a bunch about the post yesterday. Yeah, I was into the playfulness of the gifs re: everything else, thanks, great eye as always. I ... think you did tell me about going into Brandis on acid. Yeah, thanks, buddy, and have a superb Saturday and Sunday. ** Scunnard, Hey. I keep thinking that 'Disintegration' is the big hole in my limited interest in The Cure 'cos it seems to be the go-to album for Emos and stuff. I think I'll stream it and fill that emptiness inside me, or I guess exaggerate it, if the Emos are right. Love 'Pornography', though. 'A Strange Day' is one of my all-time favorite songs, which feels kind of embarrassing to say for some reason. Keep it up, man. ** Paul Curran, Thank you re: the post, sir. And, yeah, a lot for your words on 'TMS' and 'MLT'. Voice is always first for me too. I wonder if that's true with fiction writers in general. I guess I get the feeling that most writers get a voice at some early point in their development and then just blindly use it to do what they want. I can't figure out why anyone would want to do that at all. But I think maybe if you study writing, that's what they teach you to do? I mean to use the entirety of you imagination to work out premises and plots and shit? ** Steevee, It does have smart defenders for sure, and a healthy contingent of smart pooh-poohers as well. Interesting case, in any case. No, I didn't know there was a new Yob, but I'm certainly interested to hear it. Cool. Obviously very interested to read your take on 'Gone Girl'. I'm in the camp that thinks Fincher is very overrated. ** Creative Massacre, Hi, Misty! How really sweet to see you! It has been a while! I'm doing really well, thanks. Really busy but for very good reasons, I think. It would awesome to see you more often, it goes so much without saying. Lots of love to you! ** Kyler, Hi, K. Oh, shit, I'm sorry about your family stuff. Hang in there, or maybe I mean hang in here. Not here as in the blog, but here as in your life outside your family. Very interesting about that hypnotism/ past-life regression things or things. But, wait, you were a ghost at one point? But I thought ghosts didn't die, so how did you manage to escape the eternality of ghost existence and get reborn? ** Sypha, I don't remember who that 'EtV' actor was? The main guy/ghost who got killed? Cat Day sounds like a total joy, and I'll be very excited to get and host it. You rule! I've never heard of 5 Seconds of Summer. What a ridiculous but weirdly almost kind of interesting name. ** Misanthrope, Good question about Corey Haim's ghost. What do the experts say about that? Do you get to idealize yourself when you become paranormal? Yeah, if LPS ends up in your neck or house, you obviously would be doing him a huge favor by helping him learn the basics. I don't believe in ghosts either, but I guess since the movie that scared me the most as an adult was 'Blair Witch Project' that means the idea of ghosts must scare me to some degree too when their premise is combined with the right cinematography or something? ** That seems to be that. Lee Bul has you so completely covered this weekend thanks to the good graces of Thomas Moronic. Enjoy what that entails, won't you? See you on Monday.