leebul

Monster:Pink, 1998.
Fabric, cotton filling, sequins, silicone,236x150x160 cm.

    HUO : " My next question is about the way you use nature in many of your works. In a discussion we had one year ago in Seoul you told me about your fish pieces and your butterfly pieces. The fish, for example, emanates a very strong smell, but at the same time includes lots of artificial elements. In your garden in the exhibition at the Recycling Art Pavilion(Expo Science Park, Taejon) in 1994, you used both manufactured nature and given nature."

    LB : "The garden work is the more pertinent to your comment about the crossing of existing nature and contrived or invented nature, because the fish and the butterfly works have other issues that are more central, i.e., that do naturak objects signify about womanhood and femininty , particularly in Korean culture?

  The garden piece was my response to the organizers of the exhibition, who wanted a conventional artwork to place in a very unconventional setting. The venue had an atrium-like roof which was completely glass, and the exhibition was to last for a year. So, an artwork, an object, had it been displayed in that setting, would thave eventually deteriorated from exposure to the extreme sunlight. What I did was to put an ironic twist on the concept of the exhibition organizers, who wanted some sense nature within this very artificial setting.

   The subtitle of the artwork was "How far would this contemporary art grow in a year?" the idea being that what we take as nature and natural - beyond human control, superhuman, or transcendent - is in fact subject to all sorts of human forces, and we simply idealize nature as something that exists apart from human intervention, manipulation and construction.

  So I used both artificial flowers and real plants, which either could die over the course of the exhibition, or, depending upon how much human intervention actually went into it, could grow into a garden."

        - from interview with hans-Ulrich Obrist




	Monster:Pink, 1998. Fabric, cotton filling, sequins, silicone,236x150x160 cm.
	HUO : " My next question is about the way you use nature in many of your works. In a discussion we had one year ago in Seoul you told me about your fish pieces and your butterfly pieces. The fish, for example, emanates a very strong smell, but at the same time includes lots of artificial elements. In your garden in the exhibition at the Recycling Art Pavilion(Expo Science Park, Taejon) in 1994, you used both manufactured nature and given nature." LB : "The garden work is the more pertinent to your comment about the crossing of existing nature and contrived or invented nature, because the fish and the butterfly works have other issues that are more central, i.e., that do naturak objects signify about womanhood and femininty , particularly in Korean culture? The garden piece was my response to the organizers of the exhibition, who wanted a conventional artwork to place in a very unconventional setting. The venue had an atrium-like roof which was completely glass, and the exhibition was to last for a year. So, an artwork, an object, had it been displayed in that setting, would thave eventually deteriorated from exposure to the extreme sunlight. What I did was to put an ironic twist on the concept of the exhibition organizers, who wanted some sense nature within this very artificial setting. The subtitle of the artwork was "How far would this contemporary art grow in a year?" the idea being that what we take as nature and natural - beyond human control, superhuman, or transcendent - is in fact subject to all sorts of human forces, and we simply idealize nature as something that exists apart from human intervention, manipulation and construction. So I used both artificial flowers and real plants, which either could die over the course of the exhibition, or, depending upon how much human intervention actually went into it, could grow into a garden." - from interview with hans-Ulrich Obrist