Lee Bul

On January 25, 1964, Lee was born to political dissident parents in Yeongju, Gyeongsangbuk-do, under the rule of President Park Chung-Hee. During her studies at Hongik University in Seoul, Lee was exposed to conventional mediums: stone and steel forms. As an independent artist, she worked with softer, more malleable materials, such as fabric, foam, rubber and sequins, then experimented with organic forms, originating from personal perceptions, memories and experiences. Furthermore, she played with themes of othering, directed from her experiences as a child of dissidents; outward appearances were deemed vital to survival, so Lee was curious about reactions to a grotesque outer shell.[5]

Lee Bul was involved in the global arts scene and the "New Generation", or "3-8-6" generation, a group of young abstractionist artists experimenting with painting, sculpture, media art. The 3 digit marker refers to a generation, born in the 1960s, who went to university in the 1980s, while in their thirties. They had escaped from the Korean War and witnessed massive student engagement in Minjung-led demonstrations when of age.[6] She and Choi Jeong Hwa are among the group’s representatives. The group identified with anarchic, transgressive experimentalism, as a form of rebellion against Minjung art, traditional aesthetics and political messages. She and Choi Jeong-hwa founded the art group Museum (Myujiom) in 1987, in response to the politically charged Minjung art groups. The Museum advocated “the meaning of being meaningless,” rather than possessing specific ideologies.[7] Lee Bul's participation in the Museum was a distrustful reaction to authoritarian ideas on aesthetics under years of military dictatorship. Like other 3-8-6 artists, her art focused on daily experiences and an interest in the body. Driven by the desire to shock the audience, her performances and sculptural installations of the 1980s were unconventional for their provocativeness and merging performance with unusual sculptural forms. Lee's Majestic Splendor series (1991), which were installations of decomposing fish decorated with sequins within clear Mylar bags explored themes of beauty, vulnerability, decay and dread. The ornamental pattern, representing class, gender and power, would serve as remnants of beauty through past memory.[7] For Lee, sequins have a sentimental association, as her mother crafted bags and other accessories, while sequins are a symbol of Korean female labour, female vanity and fantasy. Many women made sequined bags and purses (in the 1970s) in the textile industry, under unpleasant conditions.[8] Furthermore, she was the first female artist to represent Korea at the Venice Biennale. The Korean Pavilion at Venice was guaranteed success with Lee Bul's award of Honourable Mention.[9]

Lee currently lives and primarily works in Seoul, South Korea.

Most of Lee's artworks are installation pieces that involve the audience or herself being placed into the work.[10] Her work appears to refer to some of the brutality of the Korean government up through 1987, with reference to torture.[3] Lee pulls inspiration for her work from a variety of sources including film, literature, architecture, and the political and cultural history of Europe and South Korea.[11] In an interview with Lee Bul by Soraya Murray, Lee mentions that despite her upbringing in a very political family, Lee has never personally identified with South Korea's late-coming feminist movement. “I don’t believe in any ‘isms’ ” she says. But she is an artist who constantly questions political ideals. A lot appears to comment on the ideals surrounding women’s bodies and the desire for bodily improvement.[12] For Lee's Live Forever (2001), there is conflict between human and nature, encapsulated in the struggle for immortality through technology is elaborated upon with. In this multi- media installation, three white pods that resemble futuristic auto designs are arranged in the exhibition space. The appearance of the work is like a streamlined concept car, very futuristic. Unlike any of Lee's previous works, this work is fluid and is a rare piece of art accessible to the audience. Viewers can see the occupants through the glass. In the Live Forever capsule, sound can't be heard because Lee Bul uses acoustic foam to silence the noise. Futuristic and clean, these objects are beyond the abjection of Lee's monsters or her amputee female cyborgs. Nevertheless they remain ambivalent objects, compositing controlled, phallic external profiles with richly upholstered interiors that suggest prenatal chambers.

Soraya Murray in the article “Cybernated Aesthetics: Lee Bul and the Body Transfigured” mentions " Live Forever resonates with the same intensity as the artist's former explorations of technology and the body. In their visual control and denial of uncontrollability, the karaoke pods powerfully address embodiment through their almost hysterical, technological containment of the Aesh. Simultaneously, this project continues Lee's engagement with women's bodies, particularly female sexuality as a modernist trope for the seductive and annihilative power of modern technology.[13] In 1989, her performance "Abortion," was Lee Bul's first performance art in which she is naked in front of an audience, tied by a rope and hanging upside down from the ceiling, head to the ground, looking in agony. This position is like an infant emerging from the womb, which is materializing the difficulty of obtaining an abortion. She was considered at the forefront of avant-garde art in the metropolises of Tokyo and Seoul. Lee's work consistently breaches psychological, social, and political taboos while providing provocative homages to fear, pathos, beauty, and humor. As one of the only contemporary.[14][15] Lee raised issues of “art vs craft” and of the laboring class through her embroidery works with sequins and beads and sublimated female crafts as art. Such crafts were an unrecognized means of livelihood for restless working-class women with children and housework to attend to.[16] Sorry for suffering – You think I’m a puppy on a picnic 1990 is inspired from where Lee walked the streets of Tokyo dressed in one of her soft sculptures, interacting with a few passersby. Installed throughout the exhibition hall are two timelines explaining the political landscape that shaped much of Lee's practice, the timelines appropriately address the marginalization of women in South Korea from 1960 – 2000 and historical guidance of the North and South Korean division. This is believed to be a feminist critique on the controlling of women's bodies in patriarchal East Asian society, given Lee had transformed her female body into something monstrous; something socially unacceptable. Lee wanted to wear the outfit on a flight, but airport staff said she was too fat and bulky, so she was not allowed to fly. After some debate it was finally agreed that Lee could board the plane, provided she bought two seats. How better to show the restrictions placed on our bodies, than by donning a monster suit, and defying the (airline) rules? [17]

In 1998, Lee was selected as one of six shortlisted artists, including Huang Yong Ping, William Kentridge, Pipilotti Rist, Lorna Simpson and the eventual winner, Douglas Gordon, for the Hugo Boss Prize.[24]

Lee has had solo exhibitions worldwide including Live Forever which toured the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York and The Power Plant in Toronto. She was selected as a finalist for the 1998 Hugo Boss Prize by the Guggenheim Museum, New York.

Other museums that have presented exhibitions of her work include Fondation Cartier, Paris;[25] Domus Artium, Salamanca; Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney; Japan Foundation, Tokyo; MAC, Musée d'Art Contemporain, Marseille; Le Consortium;[26] Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philadelphia;[27] Kunsthalle Bern, Switzerland; and the Museum of Modern Art, New York.[28]

Her two-person exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, was titled Projects 57, Bul Lee, Matsui Chie was held in 1996. Bul Lee and Matsui Chie were presented as avant-garde female artists who were using installation art to challenge male-dominated social norms in far east Asia.[29]

In March 2010, the Hara Museum ARC unveiled a permanent installation by Lee Bul entitled A Fragmentary Anatomy of Every Setting Sun. In February 2012, Tokyo's Mori Art Museum mounted a mid-career survey exhibition, the artist's largest exhibition to date.[30]

In this video "Artist Lee Bul reveals her thinking and inspiration behind her site-specific installation at the Turbine Hall of the Industrial Precinct on Cockatoo Island, titled ‘Willing To Be Vulnerable’ (2015–16) for the Embassy of the Real." Biennale of Sydney, "Artist interview with Lee Bul about Willing To Be Vulnerable," in Smarthistory, September 10, 2021, accessed December 1, 2021, https://smarthistory.org/artist-interview-with-lee-bul-about-willing-to-be-vulnerable/.

The Southbank Centres newly reopened Hayward Gallery hosted a survey of Lee's artists work beginning at the end of May 2018, her first in London; which explores the artist's extensive investigation into the body and its relationship to architectural space. Occupying the entire gallery, this exhibition includes documentation of early performances, sculptural works from the iconic Monster, Cyborg and Anagram series and recent immersive installations, as well as a selection of the artist's studio drawings.[31][32]

In November 2020, an exhibition of the artist's work opened at St. Petersburg's Manege Central Exhibition Hall, 'marking a first-time encounter between Lee Bul's works and those by artists of the Russian avant-garde that influenced them.'[33]

• Lee Bul studio