Lee Bul

Born in South Korea in 1964, Lee Bul initially studied sculpture, but quickly extended her practice to various media: in the late 1980s she began creating voluminous forms that were often paired with performances. Some of these sculptures, with stuffed appendages and extensions, were worn in performances in the streets and other public spaces, in representations of the body as a mutable, artificial, and sometimes monstrous construct. The artist’s interest in the human form, simultaneously a body as well as a social entity, continued into the late 1990s when these themes were developed in her Cyborgs and Anagrams series, sculptures made of fantastical and twisted tentacle-like limbs or baroque bio-mechanical forms. These creations expand the idea of the physical body to include new technologies that redraw the frontiers of human existence, where the borders between reality, science, and fiction are intentionally left up to individual interpretation. Lee Bul gladly combines sound, video, and solid objects that are a cross between sculpture and design, according to her artistic needs. While Lee Bul allows herself to go to great lengths to imagine an improved world in some of her works, thereby sending a positive message, other sculptures—despite their magnificent lightness of form, a common thread throughout the project—are charged with allusions to brutal events and figures in Korean history. Thaw (Takaki Masao) (2007) is a sort of ice sarcophagus for the military dictator Park Chung-Hee, responsible for South Korea’s brusque modernization between 1961 and 1979. Heaven and Earth (2007), a sculpture reminiscent of a bathtub that evokes the human figure due to its size, supports a stylized representation of Baekdu Mountain, the mythical birthplace of the Korean nation, on its edges. Lee’s more recent works have similarly dual concerns; at once forward-looking yet retrospective, seductive but suggestive of ruin. Sculptures suspended like chandeliers, elaborate assemblages that glimmer with crystal beads and chains and mirrors, poignantly evoke castles in the air. The sculptures reflect utopian architectural schemes of the early 20th century as well as architectural images of totalitarianism from Lee’s experiences of military Korea.