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💡 04. Introducing Lee Bul

Lee Bul is a Korean multidisciplinary artist who explores progress and perfection through futuristic imageries.

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By Chloe Sun
3 min read
💡 04. Introducing Lee Bul

Lee Bul: About the Artist

Lee Bul is a multimedia artist who experiments across drawing, sculpture, painting, perfomance, and installation. She was born in Yeonju, South Korea and is now based in Seoul. Her works often explore the human desire to transcend and attain perfection via technology, resulting in cyborg-like creations. Lee is particularly interested in the evolution of utopian ideals, both how they have failed and persisted.

Contacts: Unfortunately, I could not find a portfolio website or social media account for Lee. However, she has been featured and interviewed by a variety of prestigious institutes and publications, so I will attach those in the resources section :)

Project Spotlight: The Genesis Facade Commission - Lee Bul, Long Tail Halo

The Genesis Facade Commission is an newly established contemporary art commission at the Met, where every year, artists are invited to create works of art for the museum’s iconic facade. In 2024, Lee Bul was the commissioned artist, and she created Long Tail Halo, a series of four monumental scultures: There are CTCS #1 and CTCS #2, which recall cubist deconstruction, greco-roman marble sculptures, and historical armors in form (all of which can be found in the Met). There are then Secret Sharer II and Secret Sharer III, which are more abstract and entirely crystalline, non-figural in form yet posed as if seated. They possess Lee Bul’s signature elegant yet dissected style, provoking questions regarding perfection and progress. Long Tail Halo will be up from 12 September 2024 to 10 June 2025.

Thoughts: Personal Reflections and Connections

I find Lee Bul’s work to be extremely graceful yet haunting at the same time. Her sculptures reference the human form, but that form is ultimately disrupted by fragmentation, disfigurement, and amalgamation. They often lack heads and therefore lose identity, commentating on the standardization and depersonalization that must come with the pursuit of absolute technological perfection. Personally, her interrogration of progress is extremely interesting, relevant, and deeply philosophical.

Compared to artists like Osheen Siva, Lee Bul also presents a colder, more dystopian and technologically-driven exploration of the future - working moreso in spaces of high contemporary art. Her practice seems much more conceptual and structural, focusing on large-scale 3D works that runsettle rather than hearten.

Finally, Lee Bul also prominently features cyborg imagery, which is major motif in futurist artworks, such as that of Hiroto Ikeuchi. After all, the synthesis of man and technology naturally brings about existentialism. However, I find it particularly interesting that, in comparison, Southeast Asian, South Asian, Pacific Islander, and Indigenous artists also emphasize the relationship between man and nature as a keystone of the future. This delicate and complex pyramid between humanity, technology, and nature beckons so much creative interpretation - I will definitely need to investigate it further.

Resources and Further Readings 📖

This entry is just a simple introduction to Lee Bul and her body of work. If you are interested in exploring her process, practice, and philosophy in greater depth, I have gathered below a little index of resources that I found very informative. I have also starred sources that were exceptionally in-depth and enlightening.

A talk with Lee Bul regarding the Genesis Facade Commission, hosted and shared by the Met:

Photographs of Lee’s installation, “Long Tail Halo,” for the Met’s Genesis Facade Commission, as posted by The Met Modern on Instagram ⬇️

RESEARCH. Visions of Pan Asian Futures (VPAF)
asian art history of art visual studies art education futurism cyborgs
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