ART-PREVIEW:Lee Bul-Utopia Saved

Trained as a sculptor during the period of social and political upheavals in the Korea of the 1980s, Lee Bul started off her artistic career with performative pieces that incorporated wearable soft sculptures. In the 1990s she gained international recognition with a series of provocative works, including her scandalous installation of fresh fish left to decay and her “Cyborg” sculptures, hybrids of machine and organic forms. In the 2000s she became interested in using her art to explore the history of modernity. Lee began creating large-scale installations and architectural sculptures – imaginative inquiries into history fused with her personal memory and experience.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: The Manege Archive

Lee Bul’s longstanding fascination with utopia entered a new phase in the first decade of the 21st century, when she started creating architectural sculptures and drawings inspired by Constructivism and Russian avant-garde art and architecture. The artist uses icons and tropes from utopian modernism, transforming, allegorising, and juxtaposing them in her own creative works. She engages with utopian modernism with empathy and originality, with critique and imagination. “Utopia Saved” is Lee Bul’s first solo exhibition to be held in Russia, and for the first time presents her post-2005 works alongside the Russian art that inspired them. The exhibition focuses on the artist’s environmental installations, architectural sculptures, and drawings produced since 2005, from a maquette for Mon grand récit to the Civitas Solis and the Willing To Be Vulnerable series, among others, in addition to preparatory studies that reveal the complexity of her creative process. Some of the drawings and maquettes included in this exhibition have never been shown before. These will for the first time be exhibited together with works by Russian avant-garde artists that have intrigued her imagination for years. The “Utopia Saved” exhibition is one of Lee Bul’s most personal artistic expressions. It is the first time that the artist will fully explain to the public the sources of the current phase of development of her artistic path and the influence that the Russian avant-garde has had on her work. The exhibition focus on the architectural sculptures, environmental installations, and drawings that Lee Bul has produced since 2005, including some drawings and maquettes that have never before been shown. The exhibition includes one of her most recent works “Untitled (Willing To Be Vulnerable Velvet#9 JTVP3582/23 CE)”, a collage on velvet. Other large-scale installations from the Willing To Be Vulnerable series will be reassembled especially for the Manege exhibitions. “Via Negativa II” (2014)  is the perfect example of Bul’s intrepid artistry. As simple as it is visually complex, her artwork forces the viewer into direct confrontation with perspective itself. Part of the structure’s facade is adorned with disordered pages from a text that speaks to Bul’s ideas on the formations of self-consciousness. The overwhelming scale of “Civitas Solis II” (2014) takes the conventional concept of “installation” to a whole new level, filling the exhibition space with a single work. The walls and floor of the space are covered with mirrors, enabling viewers to experience a seemingly infinite expansion of space with no edges or borders. The space transcends the control of our senses and perceptions, thus conjuring an uncanny sense of fear or dread. The work is inspired by “The City of the Sun”, a classic utopian text by Tommaso Campanella, a philosopher and socialist of the Italian Renaissance. “The City of the Sun”depicts a utopian city based on Campanella’s reformative principles. Lee appropriates both the form of a city surrounded by a circular wall and the meaning inherent to that form. Within the endless reflections of the mirrors, the audience will find a flickering sign that reads “CIVITAS SOLIS,” a reversed reflection of bulbs resembling huge flames that are attached to the mirrors.

“Utopia Saved” also, focus on the creative visual dialogue between Lee Bul and the Russian avant-garde. Included in the latter are works by: Kazimir Malevich, Aleksandr Rodchenko, Aleksandra Ekster, architects Ivan Leonidov and Iakov Chernikhov, scientist and thinker Konstantin Tsiolkovsky and others.

Photo: Lee Bul, Willing To Be Vulnerable, 2015–2016. Heavy-duty fabric, metalized film, transparent film, polyurethane ink, fog machine, LED lighting, electronic wiring, dimensions variable. Installation view of the 20th Biennale of Sydney, 2016. Photo: Algirdas Bakas. Courtesy: Studio Lee Bul

Info: Curator: Sunjung Kim, Co-Curator: SooJin Lee, The Manege Central Exhibition Hall, 1 Isaakiyevskaya Ploshchad, St. Petersburg, Duration: 13/11/2020-31/1/2021, Days & Hours: Mon-Tue & Thu-Sun 11:00-20:00, Wed 11:00-21:00, http://manege.spb.ru