User:Af4718/Lee Bul

Biography
On January 25, 1964, Lee was born to political dissident parents in Yeongju, Gyeongsangbuk-do, under the military regime of President Park Chung-Hee. During her studies at Hongik University in Seoul, Lee was exposed to conventional mediums: stone and steel forms. As an independent artist, she worked with softer, more malleable materials, such as fabric, foam, rubber and sequins then experimented with organic forms, originating from personal perceptions, memories and experiences. Furthermore, she played with themes of othering, directed from her experiences as a child of dissidents; outward appearances were deemed vital to survival, so Lee was curious about reactions to a grotesque outer shell.

Lee Bul was involved in the global arts scene and the "New Generation", or "3-8-6" generation, a group of young abstractionist artists experimenting with painting, sculpture, media art. The 3 digit marker refers to a generation, born in the 1960s, who went to university in the 1980s, while in their thirties. They had escaped from the Korean War and witnessed massive student engagement in minjung-led demonstrations when of age. She and Choi Jeong Hwa are among the group’s representatives. The group identified with anarchic, transgressive experimentalism, as a form of rebellion against Minjung art, traditional aesthetics and political messages. She and Choi Jeong-hwa founded the art group Museum (Myujiom) in 1987, in response to the politically charged minjung art groups. The Museum advocated “the meaning of being meaningless,” rather than possessing specific ideologies. Lee Bul's participation in the Museum was a distrustful reaction to authoritarian ideas on aesthetics under years of military dictatorship. Like other 3-8-6 artists, her art focused on daily experiences and an interest in the body. Driven by the desire to shock the audience, her performances and sculptural installations of the 1980s were unconventional for their provocativeness and merging performance with unusual sculptural forms. Lee's Majestic Splendor series (1991), which were installations of decomposing fish decorated with sequins within clear Mylar bags explored themes of beauty, vulnerability, decay and dread.The ornamental pattern, representing class, gender and power, would serve as remnants of beauty through past memory. For Lee, sequins have a sentimental association, as her mother crafted bags and other accessories, while sequins are a symbol of Korean female labour, female vanity and fantasy. Many women made sequined bags and purses (in the 1970s) in the textile industry, under unpleasant conditions. Furthermore, Lee was the first female artist to represent Korea at the Venice Biennale. The Korean Pavilion at Venice was guaranteed success with Lee Bul's award of Honourable Mention.

Lee currently lives and primarily works in Seoul, South Korea.

Cyborg Sculptures
Lee Bul's Cyborg series (1997-2000) was first exhibited at the Artsonje Center in Seoul, Korea in 1998. The bodies did not have a distinct biological gender, but seemed to possess female, hourglass shapes. A monster, titled Monster: Black (1998), a pile of excrement with multiple tentacles stands between them, which serves as a seven-foot tidal wave that towers over the sleek figures. Human and machine forms merge to give birth to a third. Female accentuated and idealized forms in ancient Greek culture, sexual charge of Japanese manga. Her cyborgs are simultaneously well-proportioned and sensuous and fragmented- a symbol of human imperfection, despite its biological and cyber nature to transcend physical and mental limitations. The sensual aspect alludes to the repressed life of ancient Greek women and women's objectified nature in manga. As a monster and cyborg, the body can explore the extremes beyond what is human. The cyborgs, W1-W4, for instance, are four white figures hang from the ceiling, casting ghostly shadows. The headless, one-armed and one-legged figures are abnormally pornographic, with waists, breasts and buttocks accentuated by the armorlike corsets that don them. Lee states, "There's a very strange, ambivalent mixture of nostalgia for an impossible purity (usually embodied in the form of virginal young girls” and a dread of uncontrollable and potentially destructive sexual energy and power sublimated into the forms of machines.”  Cyborgs, monsters and hybrids transcends models of identity involving nation, gender, race or class. The cyborg merges human and machine boundaries, providing an inherent acceptance of possible aberrations to the body. Lee's work is associated with cybernated aesthetics, or the human experience induced by technological object and artist.

Lee's fascination with early 20th century Modernism is reflected in her Cyborg series. Hans Bellmer, a male artist, writes about a man who identifies with his artificial female offspring with her position as a passive victim, while remaining on the outside, as a voyeur. Similarly, other avant-garde artists created not only puppeteered victims to bond with, but machine women who threatened to destroy or castrate men. Lee Bul incorporates these ideas of a frightening, castrating woman, a nice, innocent Asian woman, a puppet, flower, butterfly, insect, fish (symbols of beautiful fragility) and the woman as a damaged victim and growing, fertile, knotted techno monster. The intricate knots and tangles portray femininity as something that can not be identified easily, resulting in a paradoxical nature of being beautifully ornate, but disgusting and terrifying.

Lee Bul's cyborgs represent tropes for fear and fascination with the uncategorizable, the uncanny,” in her words. Her body assumed monstrous appendages, in early performances, such as “Sorry for Suffering- You think I’m a puppy on a picnic? (1990),” where she attempted to wear a red body suit, while boarding a plane. Although her cyborgs stick to a coherent form in Amaryllis (1999), Supernova and Crysallis (2000), they have a disconnect from the viewer for their paradoxical characteristics: “male and female,” “glorious and sinister,” “familiar and alien,” “grotesque and strangely seductive.” As Lee presents her own body as monstrous and alien, her cybernated bodies assumes the same nature. As a result, there is no comfort zone between object and viewer, and an attained conflict between human and nature and quest to attain immortality through technology- Live Forever (2001). Furthermore, a limbo between time and location has been established. Yvonne Volkart states that Lee Bul causes the viewer to examine their doubts and the process of their journey, including the people that they may meet. Her Cyborg series has given her the label of “feminist artist” by critics, but she passionately criticizes any irrational societal tradition or practice. For her, the body exists as an object and the self. The cyborg, despite its defective state, looks enduring and something to not be replaced or to be ashamed of; it can remain valiant.