ART-PRESENTATION: Lee Bul

Adapted from an internationally touring retrospective, Lee Bul’s solo show at the Vancouver Art Gallery pulls together diverse aspects of her acclaimed career. It touches on a number of the Korean artist’s interests and expressions over the past 15 years, from early drawings of costumes for street performances to interactive, architectonic sculptures.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Vancouver Art Gallery Archive

Born in South Korea in 1964, Lee Bul was the daughter of political dissidents opposed to the country’s military dictatorship. The exhibition begins with 100 drawings produced by the artist since the mid ‘90s.The works she began producing in the late 1980s and early 1990s was political too, although not in the sense of explicitly opposing a totalitarian form of government. Rather, it critiqued other ideologies and cultural constructs, especially those around gender, sexuality, and desire. Other drawings are studies for her installations of rotting fish embellished with sequins and her well-known series of cyborg sculptures. Also on view are 72 works on paper developing ideas for an ambitious grouping of interconnected sculptures. Since the turn of the millennium, Lee’s sculptures have been largely architectural in form and reference, addressing humankind’s aspirations toward a utopian way of life. These works are also informed by the artist’s concerns about the rapid and decidedly non-utopian urbanization and development in her home country, and throughout the world. Pages from Jaynes’s book “The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind”, in both English and Korean, are pasted on the exterior of Lee’s walk-through sculpture “Via Negativa”. Together with the Jaynes text, the mirrored interior of this work, a maze filled with a disorienting succession of reflecting angles, turns, and dead ends, suggests a confrontation with ourselves, of who we are and how we have constructed a sense of self. The untitled, chandelier like sculpture hanging in the Vamcouver’s Art Gallery rotunda alludes, somewhat obliquely, to Taut’s 1917 proposal for a utopian, mountain-sized glass structure. Lee’s mixed-media sculpture, with its draped and dangling strands of crystal, glass, and acrylic beads, does not attempt to mimic such a form but does communicate a kind of wonder. The last gallery in the exhibition is installed as if it were the artist’s studio, filled with two- and three-dimensional studies for recent installation and sculpture projects.

Info: Curator Daina Augaitis, Vancouver Art Gallery, 750 Hornby Street, Vancouver, Duration: 30/10/15-10/1/16, Days & Hours: Fri-Wed 10:00-17:00, Thu 10:00-21:00, www.vanartgallery.bc.ca