PRESENTATION: Lee Bul

Lee Bul’s work investigates the ways that contemporary art, architecture and technology have shaped both our real and imagined worlds. The artist draws inspiration from diverse sources as well as European and South Korean history to create hybrid forms that convey a fantastical and often disconcerting dystopian vision. Made from deliberately contradictory materials that range from organic silk and mother of pearl to manufactured fibreglass and silicone, her work explores the utopian potentials but also the darker undercurrents of an increasingly technological culture.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Thaddaeus Ropac Gallery Archive

In lee Bul’s solo exhibition in Paris, over twenty paintings from two of the artist’s most recent series are on display: the sensuous mother of pearl and acrylic “Perdu” works, and the “Velvet” collages made out of fragments of photographic material, paint and mother of pearl. Lee Bul combines traditional methods and materials and a futuristic aesthetic in her work, exploring the notion of utopia in its imaginary potential to reveal its darker undertones. Born in 1964 of left-wing dissident parents under South Korea’s military dictatorship, she draws on her childhood experiences, as well as European and South Korean culture, to create works that resonate across time and history, warning of the dangers of humanity’s perpetual yearning for an ideal society. The “Perdu” works, presented in the main space of Thaddaeus Ropac Gallery, exemplify Lee Bul’s approach by bringing together past, present and future temporalities through the materials and references they incorporate. The term perdu translates from French as “lost,” notably used in Proust’s “À la Recherche du Temps Perdu” (In Search of Lost Time), 1913–1927. 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. On a formal level, the Perdu works are related to the “Cyborg” sculptures and subsequent “Anagram” series the artist began creating in the late 1990s. Part-organic, part-mechanical, the figures that inhabit Lee Bul’s vibrant paintings appear as though in motion, reconfiguring themselves from one painting to the next on the walls of the gallery in search of a final form. Unfixed, these anthropomorphic creatures allow us to contemplate our fascination with progress and the anxieties that surround our constant search for perfection. Upstairs, in the “Velvet” collages, Lee Bul constructs shimmering traceries and constellations from small pieces of photographs of her works, reference images and materials from her studio including paint and mother of pearl, which she applies onto rich grounds of silk velvet. The result is an intricate, phantasmagorical landscape with a crystalline architecture that might be found in a city of the future as much as it could belong to a long-forgotten underwater civilisation. Throughout her practice, which spans three decades, the artist looks for references and materials that embody contradiction. “I choose what I work with very carefully” states Lee Bul, “everything has connotations, stories and I utilise them”. Mother of pearl and velvet in particular, which form the basis of the two series of works, interest her because they “are related to organisms that come from the inside out”. Despite its hard appearance, mother of pearl is found on the inside of shellfish, which produce the substance to repair wounds. Velvet, in turn, was originally made to replace hair and fur in clothing, and is made out of silk, which is a secretion from worms. This duality is central to Lee Bul’s critique of utopia, whose ultimate failure she sees as inherent to the notion itself. ‘For me, utopia in its paradoxical essence is a nostalgic, even elegiac, idea’, she explains. This ambivalence is carried throughout her oeuvre, which seems suspended in time and space, somewhere between dream, reality and nightmare. By confronting viewers with the shortcomings of idealism and the human condition, it is this underlying darkness that gives the Perdu and Velvet works their poignancy and their power.

Photo: Lee Bull Perdu XXV, 2019, Mother of pearl, acrylic paint on wooden base panel, steel frame, Triptych, 163.3 x 333.3 x 6.6 cm, © Lee Bul, Courtesy the artist and Thaddaeus Ropac Gallery

Info: Thaddaeus Ropac Gallery, 7 Rue Debelleyme, Paris, France, Duration: 20/1-26/2/2022, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-19:00, https://ropac.net