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Lee Bul (Oct. 16, 1998 - Nov. 15, 1998)
I first encountered Lee Bul's work in a group exhibition titled "Plastic Spring".
That was five years ago, but I can still recall my astonishment at seeing rows of
fish in clear plastic bags lining the gallery walls. The forceful impression left by
that work-the dead, disintegrating flesh of the fish painstakingly ornamented with
sparkling sequins-remains to this day.
In the current exhibition, her first solo
presentation in Korea in ten years, Lee is showing new works which seem at first
to depart from the kinds of production we've come to identify with her. But
beneath the apparent changes in the form of her more recent efforts, there
continues a coherent expansion of the concerns, both aesthetic and cultural, that
gave rise to her early work.
To get a more intimate insight into her work, I once accompanied the artist as
she went shopping for materials. We went to a marketplace that specializes in
sequins and other decorative ornaments. It was a remarkable place, a vast
warehouse-like complex filled with an infinite variety of sequins arranged several
layers deep on display stands-a world unto itself, in the middle of Seoul, of
bewildering and brilliant surfaces. It was this world that had initially shaped her
sense of texture, color, and organic composition.
From Lee Bul's earlier works, such as the wearable soft sculptures that were an
integral part of her performances, the embroidered blanket imprinted with a nude
image of herself, and the sequined fish, we can discern a fascination with the
tenuous materiality of sedufctive surfaces. But over the years, her preoccupations
have deepened to include meditations on the shifting boundaries, both actual and
symbolic, between the external and the internal, the skin and what lies beneath,
the self and the world beyond.
Her recent series of white cyborgs (Chborg W1-W4), for example, calls to mind
the statuesque solidity of classical sculpture. But they're in fact made of silicone,
a material also used in medical technology for substitution of the human body, and
the insides of these cyborgs, far from solid, are composed of porous polyurethane
foam. Missing limbs and organs, these cyborgs are unstable bodies, beyond
teleology, forever on the verge of completion.
By contrast, Monster: Pink and
Monster: Black seem to have multiplied beyond their prescribed "natural"
parameters. Suggesting at once dark aberration and trasgressive potential, the
former seems to be all soft, slick innards, and the latter, all scaly surface.
Lee Bul's work continues to sparkle and shimmer, giving off a thousand tiny
refections, like to sequins in the marketplace.
- Kim Sun Jung, Chief Curator
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