Lee Bul (Korean: 이불; 李昢; born 1964) is a South Korean artist who works in various mediums, including performance, sculpture, installation, architecture, and media art. 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.Stephanie Rosenthal, ed., Lee Bul: Crashing, by Michaël J. Amy, Hayward Gallery, Martin-Gropius-Bau (London: Hayward Gallery Publishing), . Her works have engaged topics related to architecture, technology, gender, history, and memory. Lee lives and works in Seoul.
Biography Lee Bul was born on January 24, 1964, in Yeongju, Gyeongsangbuk-do, South Korea. 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.
Lee's coming of age as an artist in the late 1980s coincided with a significant period in South Korea's development in terms of democracy, modernization, and economic growth. She was initially drawn to working with art because creative fields were one of the few possibilities open to the children of dissidents.Michael Amy, "Lee Bul: Phantasmic Morphologies," Sculpture 30, no. 4 (May 2011): New Jersey. The art historian Yeon Shim Chung has argued that Lee's artistic trajectory diverged at an early stage from the oft-travelled artistic routes of her time. Lee received a B.F.A in sculptureLee Bul. The Guggenheim Museums and Foundation. Retrieved 2024-03-02. from Hongik University, Seoul in 1987, receiving her artistic training at a time when Minjung Misul—literally “People's Art”—was posing a challenge to the dominance of academic art and minimalism. The year she graduated from art school was also the year South Korea declared itself a democracy and began implementing political and economic reforms.Kataoka, Mami, and Hitomi Sasaki, eds. LEE BUL: From Me, Belongs to You Only. Tokyo: Mori Art Museum, 2012. 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.” 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).Stephanie Rosenthal, in conversation with Lee Bul. In Lee Bul: Crashing, by Michaël J. Amy. London: Hayward Gallery Publishing, 2018. . 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. In 1999, Szeemann invited Lee to participate in the 48th Venice Biennale, where she received an Honorable Mention award for her contribution to the International Pavilion and her exhibition at the Korean Pavilion.Thaddaeus Ropac website: https://ropac.net/fr/gallery-documents/14/ (Retrieved 17 June 2024)Lehmann Maupin website: https://www.lehmannmaupin.com/exhibitions/lee-bul6/press-release (Retrieved 19 June 2024)
Practice
Early work and performance Lee Bul's work of the late 1980s and early 1990s used performance to explore the relationship between the body and society in South Korea at that time.Yeon Shim Chung, "Sorry for Suffering: Lee Bul's Dissident Bodies," in Lee Bul: Crashing, ed. Stephanie Rosenthal (London: Hayward Gallery Publishing, 2018). In search of a way to express her state of being on the one hand, and the state of society on the other, she created forcefully visceral works and guerrilla-like actions, a number of which critically explored gender politics and the patriarchal order in Korean society.Stephanie Rosenthal, "Interview with Lee Bul," in Lee Bul, ed. Stephanie Rosenthal (London: Hayward Gallery Publishing, 2018), Hayward Gallery, Martin-Gropius-Bau. . Her early performances combined aspects of craft with the contingencies of circumstance and time.In an interview with Franck Gautherot, Lee Bul says "On a conceptual level, the early performances combined aspects of craft with the contingencies of circumstance and time.” Gautherot, Franck, “Supernova in Karaoke Land,” Flash Art International no. 217, March–April 2001, Milan.
Sorry for Suffering—You think I'm a puppy on a picnic? The performance work Sorry for Suffering was carried out over the course of 12 consecutive days in 1990. Lee began her public intervention at Gimpo Airport, wearing a soft sculpture resembling a body turned inside-out. Over the following days, she continued the performance in various locations, with the viewers' responses becoming an integral part of her performance.Sorry for suffering–You think I'm a puppy on a picnic?, Ayoung Kim. In: Lee Bul: Beginning (Seoul Museum of Art, 2021). 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. The art historian Ayoung Kim describes the work as "an attempt to expand the borders of artistic practice by escaping the traditional ways in which sculptures have occupied space, as well as by infusing theatrical elements into her work, such as satire, symbolism, and temporality.” The subtitle of this work You think I'm a puppy on a picnic? is quoted from the poem To Be Born Again (1981) by Korean feminist poet Choi Seung-ja.
Abortion (1989) 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.James B. Lee, “Abortion”, in: Lee Bul: Beginning (Seoul Museum of Art, 2021). 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.” 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.
Cravings Cravings is an example of Lee's performative work with soft sculptures. Lee created full-body suits constructed of sewn fabric padded with fiberfill to exaggerate and distort the anatomy of the wearer. Intricately adorned with cheap sequins and beads, each piece featured exaggerated, grotesque appendages resembling arms, legs, tentacles and tails.James B. Lee, “Cravings”, in: Lee Bul: Beginning (Seoul Museum of Art, 2021). The artwork includes performers engaging in slow improvised movements, amplified by concealed microphones highlighting their labored breathing. Cravings questions the stability of concepts like the real and artificial, illustrating how technology blurs these boundaries and transforms human expressions into alienating experiences.
Majestic Splendor A work that has been exhibited globally across multiple iterations, Lee first presented Majestic Splendor in 1991 in Seoul.Park Yuna, “Lee Bul's Early ’Soft Sculptures,’ Performances Presented in Seoul,” The Korea Herald. 6 March 2021: https://www.koreaherald.com/view.php?ud=20210304000878 (Retrieved 19 June 2024) 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.Yeon Shin Chung, "’Sorry for Suffering’: Lee Bul's Dissident Bodies,” in Stephanie Rosenthal, ed., Lee Bul: Crashing, by Michaël J. Amy, Hayward Gallery, Martin-Gropius-Bau (London: Hayward Gallery Publishing), . Over time, the work emits a putrid odor. In 1997, during the Projects exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Majestic Splendor was removed from the exhibition due to its stench.MoMA PS1 press release: https://www.moma.org/documents/moma_press-release_327726.pdf (Last accessed17 June 2024) As the art historian Yeon Shim Chung notes, Majestic Splendor operates on multiple levels, simultaneously “implicating the individual body and the politics of Korean society.”Yeon Shim Chung, "’Sorry for Suffering’: Lee Bul's Dissident Bodies,” in Stephanie Rosenthal, ed., Lee Bul: Crashing, Hayward Gallery, Martin-Gropius-Bau (London: Hayward Gallery Publishing), . Fish are a popular motif in both religious and secular Korean art traditions.Yeon Shim Chung, "’Sorry for Suffering’: Lee Bul's Dissident Bodies,” in Stephanie Rosenthal, ed., Lee Bul: Crashing, by Michaël J. Amy, Hayward Gallery, Martin-Gropius-Bau (London: Hayward Gallery Publishing), . In Majestic Splendor, Lee incorporates the sea bream, known as domi in Korean, which is associated with a renowned Korean folktale. According to the tale, the legendary heroine committed suicide to protect her virtue, rather than succumb to the advances of a lecherous king. Chung writes that Lee Bul's work “acknowledges this popular connotation, but her work overturns such emphasis on female chastity as absurd and disturbing.” A prolific material of Korea's textile industry, sequins additionally have strong personal and social connotations for the artist. Lee's mother, who was barred from traditional employment because of her political activities, worked from home decorating bags and other accessories, which surrounded the artist throughout her childhood. The work makes broader allusions to the notion of gendered labor. As Chung writes, “Signifying female vanity and fantasy, they [the sequins] also attest to the countless women who toiled in the textile industry making sequined bags and purses in the 1970s [...] the glittering materials adorning Lee Bul's fish directly invoke myriad issues of gender and class, particularly relating to the complex power dynamics that exist between female producers and female consumers.”
Monument series Between 1996 and 1999, Lee completed three mixed media installations that incorporate photographs of the artist into large scale inflatable forms. In these participatory works, viewers could inflate the outsized balloon monument via a network of tubing and foot pumps. One of these works, entitled I Need You (Monument) (1996), blows up to a 39-foot balloon that reveals the artist herself as “a kind of punk-geisha-goddess amalgamation of stereotypical images of Asian women.”Andrew Russeth, “Lee Bul at the Seoul Museum of Art Curated by Jin Kwon,” Artforum, 1 June 2021. While a monument is typically made to withstand the test of time, Lee's monument is soft, vulnerable, and ephemeral.
As the art historian Michaël Amy writes, “Lee aptly examines the exotic, oriental ideal as she believes it to be construed by the Western male—his initial desire to be seduced quickly replaced by the urge to conquer and possess.”Michaël Amy, “Lee Bul: Phantasmic Morphologies,” Sculpture, 30 April 2011.
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