ART CITIES:N.York-Lee Bul
Lee Bul is considered one of the foremost women artists from Asia to emerge in the international art scene in the 1990s. Her artistic practice represents humanity’s desire for a utopian existence. It’s a desire that is doomed to failure, but it is still driven by humankind’s wanton need for the realization of impossible dreams.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Lehmann Maupin Gallery Archive
As the title suggests, Lee Bul’s solo exhibition, “Interlude: Perdu”, features recent mixed media paintings from her “Perdu” series that blend biomorphic and cybertronic forms, vividly yet delicately rendered in acrylic paint and mother of pearl. Among the most radical and internationally regarded figures in contemporary Korean art, this is Lee Bul’s first U.S. exhibition since two of her sculptures were featured in the 58th Venice Biennale. This marked Lee Bul’s second presentation in the Biennale; the artist was invited to return after representing her country in South Korea’s pavilion and receiving an honorable mention in 1999. In her most recent “Perdu” works, Lee Bul explores the binary between the artificial and the organic, both conceptually and materially. Composed of organic and inorganic material such as mother of pearl, velvet, and acrylic paint, the artist’s otherworldly visions of fragmented bodies are seemingly caught on the move, at various distances and in differing detail. For Lee Bul, these works are connected to earlier pieces that explored corporeal and linguistic themes, such as those in her “Cyborg” (1997-2011) and “Anagram” (1999-2006) series. The unfinished state of the forms in the “Perdu” works and overall theme of a physical and metaphorical yearning for completeness is rooted in these past iterations where anagrams, like cyborgs, are formed from reconfigurable parts. The term perdu translates from French as “lost,” notably used in Proust’s “In Search of Lost Time” (1913-27). In the English language perdu can mean hidden or obscure, and is also a military term for soldiers assigned to a highly dangerous mission. Recently, Lee Bul has turned to militarization as a theme perpetually linked to the human condition, one that is almost tangential to utopia. This was best expressed in her monumental “Aubade V” (2019) sculpture included in the 51st Venice Biennale exhibition “May You Live In Interesting Times”. Constructed from repurposed steel from buildings located in the demilitarized zone between North and South Korea, the tower-like form flashed Morse Code and the International Code of Signals, both systems that communicate important messages of safety or distress. In “Interlude: Perdu”, the forms depicted similarly display seemingly contradictory messages. In Lee Bul’s Perdu works, her anthropomorphic forms are presented as beautiful, disturbing creatures that might have something to tell us about humanity’s shortcomings. This message doubly cautions against blindly investing in any technotopian fantasy that promises perfection through bioengineering’s transcendence of the human condition not collectively, as utopia was envisioned, but individually and unequally, the conditions of dystopia. In this exhibition, Lee Bul offers viewers the opportunity to contemplate the current state of the world through a vision of the future that offers both hope and fear. She invites us to consider the human impulse to promote visionary and idealistic notions as an attempt to fulfill the elusive promise of a truly egalitarian and harmonious existence.
Info: Lehmann Maupin Gallery, 536 West 22nd Street, New York, Duration: 7/11/19-18/1/20, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:l00-18:00, www.lehmannmaupin.com
