Lee Bul

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Lee Bul ( Korean 이불, * 1964 in Yeongju , Gyeongsangbuk-do ) is a South Korean contemporary visual, installation and performance artist . She is counted among the most important Korean artists of her generation and has received great international recognition for her formally inventive and intellectually provocative work.

Life

Lee Bul grew up as the daughter of two activists in a politically active environment amid turbulent social changes. She completed a BFA (Bachelor in Fine Arts) in sculpture at Hongik University in Seoul in 1987 . In the 1980s she was a founding member of Museum , a collective of artists, performers and musicians from the off-scene. In the mid-1990s, Lee Bul became increasingly known for her provocative works and was invited in 1997 to show her installation Majestic Splendor in the Projects gallery of the Museum of Modern Art in New York . A short time later, in 1998, she was nominated for the Hugo Boss Prize of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation , where she presented her Cyborgs series, which made her internationally known. In 1999 she received an Honorable Mention at the 48th Venice Biennale for her work in the Korean pavilion and the international exhibition curated by Harald Szeemann . From 2001 to 2003, her exhibition Live Forever was shown at eight North American art institutions, including the San Francisco Art Institute , San Francisco , the Fabric Workshop and Museum , Philadelphia , the New Museum of Contemporary Art , New York and The Power Plant , Toronto . Numerous solo exhibitions at international art museums and galleries followed. In 2014 she received the Noon Award at the 10th Gwangju Biennale , which is presented for experimental work on the theme of the Biennale.

Lee Bul lives and works in Seoul.

Artistic career

The political situation in South Korea in the 1980s and 1990s strongly influenced Lee Bul's career. These years were a phase of transition from military dictatorship to democracy and development in terms of modernization and economic strength.

After graduating in sculpture from Hongik University, Seoul, in 1987, Lee Bul moved her artistic practice from the studio to the public space with performances. With this work she questioned the understanding of “feminine” beauty and the role of women in society. She defied current artistic conventions by wearing, for example, in Cravings (1989) monstrous shapes made of soft fabric from which tentacle-like limbs grew out. During the performance Abortion (1989) she hung naked and upside down for almost two hours, tied in a corset, and referred to the misery of carrying out an abortion, which is still illegal in Korea .

When Lee Bul began her well-known series Cyborg (1997–2011) in the mid-1990s , she largely turned away from performance work and used three-dimensional sculptural works to explore the pursuit of perfection through the merging of man and machine. The poses of the female cyborgs are reminiscent of iconic classical sculptures like the Venus de Milo , while their luscious proportions are typical of the depiction of Western women in sexually charged Japanese comics and cartoons. However, each body in this series is incomplete in some ways. The missing heads or limbs indicate that these “perfect” figures are still in the process of transformation. In Lee Bul's later works, the cyborg takes on darker and more complex forms and refers to surrealist models. Lee Bul calls these extravagant hybrids of living organism and machine "anagrammatic morphologies". Her paintings and wall works made of silk, leather and mother-of-pearl such as Untitled (Silk Painting - Yellow) , Untitled (Silk Painting - Black) , Untitled (Mekamelencolia - Yellow velvet # 1) and Untitled (Willing To Be Vulnerable - Velvet # 6 DDRG24OC) testify of her deep and longstanding interest in experimenting with organic materials.

Lee Bul's engagement with bodies led directly to her exploration of models of utopian urban landscapes. In 2005 she started designing models inspired by modernist architectural designs. These complex sculptures and related works on paper and canvas form an imaginative topography of utopian longings and failures. These topographies appear to be an outward turning of earlier works and become a metaphor for the networked underground root system of our cities, but also for societies with their utopian ideas. Lee Bul's visions for an ideal society are inspired, among other things, by the architectural fantasies of the German architect Bruno Taut , not least of all by his Alpine architecture (1919), in which buildings are reminiscent of huge mountain ranges. It is Lee Bul's interest in the pursuit of perfection that connects these visionary landscapes with her earlier work.

Lee Bul's later works point to diverse cultural and intellectual references, from critical theory to the dystopian dream worlds of speculative novels and films. Her work develops from large-format compositions such as Mon grand récit: Weep into stones… (2005), where she lets various utopian architectural visions collide, to immersive installations that change our perception, particularly through the use of mirrors. Their expansive landscapes can be described as mediators between architecture and the body and can take on diverse formations: utopian cityscapes and cartographies; Textures and surface structures like those of our skin; Embodiments of the relentless search for an ideal place.

Works (selection)

Mon Grand Recit: Weep into Stones (2005)
  • Cravings (1989)
  • Abortion (1989)
  • Cyborg series (1997-2011)
  • Mon grand récit: Weep into stones… (2005)
  • Bunker (M. Bakhtin) (2007/2012)
  • Via Negativa (2012) and Via Negativa II (2014)
  • Willing To Be Vulnerable - Metalized Balloon (2015-2016)
  • Scale of Tongue (2017-2018)

Awards (selection)

Exhibitions

Solo exhibitions

  • MAC, Musée d'Art Contemporain, Marseille (2002)
  • Le Consortium, Dijon (2002)
  • Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney (2004)
  • Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, New Plymouth, New Zealand (2005)
  • Fondation Cartier pour l'art contemporary, Paris (2007)
  • Mori Art Museum, Tokyo (2012)
  • Musée d'Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean, Luxembourg (2013)
  • National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul (2014)
  • Ikon Gallery, Birmingham (2014)
  • Espai d'art contemporani de Castelló, Spain (2015)
  • Musée d'art Moderne et Contemporain de Saint-Etienne Métropole (2015)
  • Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2015)
  • Vancouver Art Gallery (2015)
  • Art Sonje Center, Seoul (1998, 2012 and 2016)
  • Gropius Bau, Crash, Berlin (2018)

Group exhibitions

  • Not Only Possible, But Also Necessary: ​​Optimism in the Age of Global War, 10th Istanbul International Biennale (2007)
  • Prospect 1: A Biennial for New Orleans, New Orleans (2008)
  • Transformation, Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo (2010)
  • Invisible Cities, MASS MoCA, North Adams, Massachusetts (2012)
  • Burning Down the House, 10th Gwangju Biennale, Gwangju, Korea (2014)
  • Making Traces: Magda Cordell and Lee Bul, Tate Modern, London (2015)
  • Storylines: Contemporary Art at the Guggenheim, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (2015)
  • The Future is already here - it's just not very evenly distributed, 20th Biennale of Sydney (2016)

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Press release Lee Bul: Crash. (PDF, 2.8 MB) Berliner Festspiele, Gropius Bau, accessed on February 12, 2019 .
  2. ↑ Introduction: Crash. Gropius Bau, Berliner Festspiele, accessed on February 12, 2019 .
  3. ^ Douglas Gordon, Huang Yong Ping, William Kentridge, Lee Bul, Pililotti Rist, Lorna Simpson: The Hugo Boss Prize 1998 . Ed .: Guggenheim Museum Soho, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, 1998, ISBN 0-89207-210-5 ( archive.org ).
  4. ^ FORMER WEST - 48th Venice Biennale .
  5. ↑ 제 13 회 수상자 (The 13th prize winner) (ko-KR) . 
  6. ↑ Gwangju Biennale. Accessed November 4, 2018 .
  7. ↑ 이불 설치 미술가, 문화 예술 공로 훈장 수훈 (2016 년 10 월 7 일). La France en Corée - Ambassade de France à Séoul, October 7, 2016, accessed November 4, 2018 (Korean).
  8. ↑ Lee Bul: Crash. Gropius Bau, Berliner Festspiele, accessed on February 12, 2019 .
Note: This article places the family name before the person's first name. This is the usual order in Korean. Lee is the family name here, Bul is the first name.
personal data
SURNAME Lee, Bul
ALTERNATIVE NAMES 이불 (Korean)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Korean artist
DATE OF BIRTH 1964
PLACE OF BIRTH Yeongju