world rush_4 artists
Lee Bul

Lee Bul was trained in the traditional methods of sculpture during the 1980s, a time in South Korea when the prevailing modes were either abstraction or figuration. Despite the apparent opposition between these two modes, they seemed to her to be alike in their insistence on fixed conventions. Both were orthodoxies and both, to her, were languages that closed off the possibility of saying anything new. She also disliked the physical limitation imposed on her by the use of materials such as stone and steel that were connected to the traditional idea of permanence.

When Lee Bul first turned to materials like synthetic resins, fabric, foam rubber and sequins, she was free, she says, to experiment with organic and phantasmagorical forms, with 'imaginary morphologies emerging from my private perceptions and experiences, and perhaps memories and dreams'. She notes that the Œmonstrous¹ aspect of her work is her way of exceeding prescribed boundaries. She is touching, in her own words, 'upon our fear and fascination with the uncategorisable, the uncanny'. This is the reason for her preoccupation with cyborgs and monsters, for she is tracing the seduction and the threat of the aberrant, the prodigal and the unnatural, spawned by bewildering technological advances.

As Lee Bul eloquently observes: 'Of course, the elements of menace and instability are still there, underneath the layers of intricate repression. A variant of this idea is prevalent in the Japanese Anime and Manga, from which most of our current morphologies of the cyborg are derived. With my monster sculptures, what I've done is essentially to push the logic of the largely masculine fantasy of the cyborg to its darkest extremes, to the point of convulsion'.