Lee Bul’s earliest memories are defined by dust. In a military town outside Seoul, where she lived aged 11, many of the trees had been cut down for fuel, while, under the dictator Park Chung-Hee’s modernisation programme, new roads were begun and abandoned. The inhabitants of her neighbourhood’s cheap and fragile houses came and went: soldiers, farmers who worked the fields surrounding the haphazard development, and “wanderers”, such as Bul’s parents. They were leftwing activists whose home was routinely searched by the police for banned books and needed to live in a place where people weren’t too fussy about their neighbours.
While the world outside was dry, however, home was a Technicolor Oz. As political dissidents, her parents couldn’t attend group gatherings, even at work. Compelled to labour from home, sometimes with neighbours, her mother made handbags from glass beads. “There was another landscape inside our house,” she recalls. “One room with women working with beautiful colours.”
As origin stories go, it’s a setting worthy of the dystopian fiction Bul has long channelled in her art: sci-fi movie-spectacular sculptures and installations powered by utopian dreams and social critique. Her forthcoming mid-career survey at the Hayward Gallery in London will trace how, over the past three decades, she has established herself at the forefront of South Korean art.
When we meet at the gallery a few weeks before the opening, there are cyborg babes and multi-limbed monsters hanging from the ceiling. Mirrors wrapped in cellophane lean against walls, waiting to be assembled into luminous labyrinths. Technicians are tinkering inside a high-gloss black hunk of hollow mountain that looks like a panic room for Darth Vader, but is dedicated to the Russian literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin. Throughout it all, Bul examines our flawed pursuit of perfection, be it improving our bodies, or remaking society. There’s a striking push and pull between the gorgeous and grotesque. Get up close to the darkly glittering skin of a mutant octopus creation, and you see that its sequins are matted with plant life, like something washed up in a drain.
Bul thinks the strange contrasts of her formative years are central to her approach; they have clearly engendered a strong ironic streak in her work. She has a formative childhood memory of lovers riding a motorbike that crashed into a bakery, in a smash of blood and cake. “That was a beautiful accident,” she laughs throatily.
Her work is now highly crafted, with expensive production values. It’s a universe away from when she started out. This was 1980s Korea, where protesters faced torture, and she was working within a fledgling contemporary art scene with few international influences. “There were no role models. I had to create,” she says.
Cyborg W1-W4, 1998, by Lee Bul. Facebook Twitter Pinterest Transhuman? Cyborg W1-W4, 1998, by Lee Bul. Photograph: Yoon Hyung-moon/Studio Lee Bul For Bul, her outsider status was crucial to her art: “Everything [about me] is in a minority. This is perfect for an artist.” There’s her unusual genderless name, which combined with her surname, sounds like the word blanket in Korean. She is also left-handed, something her teachers tried to suppress. “At school, they tied my hand,” she says. “At home, I was free to use it and I started drawing a lot.”
For more read the full of article at The Guardian
