Lee Bul

Biography

In 1997 one of the works had to be removed from the exhibition “Projects” at the Museum of Modern Art in New York: “Majestic Splendor” smelled. It consisted of real dead fish decorated with sequins and beads, in plastic bags pinned to the wall in a grid. As time passed the fish decayed, and the smell became the main property of the piece.

Lee Bul had first shown it in Seoul in 1991.

She was born in 1964 in Yeongju, in North Gyeongsang Province; by some accounts on 24 January, by others on 25 January. Her parents were politically active, the family moved several times, and her childhood fell under the rule of Park Chung Hee. Her mother, who had been barred from ordinary employment because of her political activity, decorated bags and other accessories at home, and sequins surrounded the future artist from childhood. They later entered “Majestic Splendor”: through them the work carries the labour of the women who sewed glittering bags for the textile industry in the 1970s. The fish is not accidental either: the sea bream (domi) is linked to a Korean folktale about a heroine who killed herself to protect her virtue. The artist, scholars write, turns this story over and makes it absurd.

She studied sculpture at Hongik University in Seoul and graduated in 1987, just as the country declared itself a democracy. At that time academic art, minimalism and Minjung Misul (“People’s Art”, a movement of socially engaged art) were contending in Korean art. Lee Bul accepted neither the socialist-realist aesthetic of the Minjung artists nor the cold materials of her training: wood, stone and metal. In the 1980s she was a member of Museum, a collective of women artists, performers and musicians. Her early work was physical and harsh. In 1989, at the Dongsoong Art Center in Seoul, she hung upside down in a climbing harness for two hours and spoke about an abortion, mixing the account with poetry, a parody of the Crucifixion and references to pop songs; the subject was taboo in Korea. It ended when the audience could no longer bear to watch her writhing in pain. In “Cravings” the performers moved in padded fabric costumes with grotesque appendages trimmed with cheap sequins. In 1990, in the performance “Sorry for Suffering”, she spent twelve days walking in a soft sculpture resembling a body turned inside out, through Gimpo Airport, shrines, university campuses and imperial palaces. The subtitle, “You think I’m a puppy on a picnic?”, is taken from a poem by the poet Choi Seung-ja.

Between 1996 and 1999 she made three inflatable “monuments” incorporating photographs of the artist. Viewers inflated them with foot pumps. “I Need You (Monument)” (1996) swells to twelve metres, and in it Lee Bul herself appears in an image assembled from stereotypes of Asian women. A monument, usually meant to last for centuries, is here soft and ephemeral.

Her international reputation came with the Cyborgs (1997–2011), first shown at the Art Sonje Center in Seoul in 1998. The white silicone figures lack heads or limbs; they recall classical sculpture, while their proportions echo the heroines of Japanese manga. In 1998 she was shortlisted for the Hugo Boss Prize, and in 1999, at the invitation of Harald Szeemann, she took part in the 48th Venice Biennale and received an Honorable Mention. Alongside the Cyborgs came the “Monsters” and the “Anagram” series: hybrids of machine, plant and animal. In 2001 she showed “Live Forever”: white fibreglass karaoke capsules resembling spaceships, in which the visitor sings alone and the voice returns as a distorted loop. The exhibition toured San Francisco, Philadelphia, New York, Toronto and other North American cities.

Since 2005 she has been working on the series “Mon grand récit” (“My Grand Narrative”): utopian cities in glass, acrylic and steel, luminous limestone formations, a reduced replica of Vladimir Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International. In “Aubade” (2007) the forms recall the towers of the engineer Vladimir Shukhov, and the neon words are in Esperanto. “Bunker (M. Bakhtin)” is a dark mountain on a glossy black surface, which one can enter; the work refers to Yi Gu, the last heir of the Joseon dynasty. It seems to me that the turn to architecture does not cancel her earlier interest in the body, and the scholar Akira Mizuta Lippit thinks the same. Since 2016 the artist has been working on the series “Perdu” (“Lost”): mother-of-pearl, lacquer, wood, acrylic.

Major surveys were held at the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo (2012), and at the Hayward Gallery in London and the Martin-Gropius-Bau in Berlin (2018). The exhibition “Utopia Saved” opened at the Manege Central Exhibition Hall in St Petersburg in November 2020. Her awards include the Korean Seok Ju Art Prize (2002), a prize at the 10th Gwangju Biennale (2014), the French Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (2016) and the Ho-Am Prize (2019). Four sculptures, “Long Tail Halo”, were shown on the façade of the Metropolitan Museum of Art from 12 September 2024 until 27 May 2025. Lee Bul lives and works in Seoul.