There are terrible visions and disquieting monsters in Lee Bul's universe, but there is also the possibility of escaping somewhere else, maybe via a silver foil Zeppelin or by walking into a mirror walled room lit by hundreds of bright bulbs.
Among the most important Korean women artists in the international arena, Lee Bul has been working for the last 30 years with dramatically different media, as proved by the retrospective "Lee Bul: Crash" (until 13th January 2019), currently on at Gropius Bau.
The first solo exhibition by the Korean artist in Germany, the event actually travelled from the Hayward Gallery in London to Gropius Bau with Stephanie Rosenthal, the new director of the Berlin-based institution, curating both the events.
The contents of the event are naturally very similar to the ones that were originally included in a 2012 retrospective at Tokyo's Mori Art Museum, but this is a bigger exhibition, featuring over 130 works, among them installations, models and drawings, collected under the same roof to provide a multi-sensory experience.
"Crash" is organised around the thematic focal points of Lee Bul's work with each section arranged chronologically to lead the visitor through a developmental trajectory of her work.
Along the path visitors will encounter dreams and nightmares, utopias and dystopias, credible futurist theories and imaginary science fiction stories, bioengineering experiments and visionary architectures.
Born in South Korea in 1964, Lee Bul graduated in sculpture from Hongik University, in 1987. During the 1980s she was a founding member of Museum, a loose collective of underground artists, performers and musicians.
South Korea lived a transition period between the 1980s and 1990s from military dictatorship to democracy, and Lee Bul's parents were political activists. This background and the modernisation of the country had an impact on the themes of her first works, many of them allude indeed at Korean history and politics.
After working in a studio environment, Lee Bul moved onto public space performances, focusing her attention on the role of women in society and the perception of female beauty.
In the performance "Cravings" (1989) for example she used a grotesquely monstrous costume made with soft fabric that featured scary tentacle-like limbs (visitors will discover it hanging from the ceiling in one of the rooms at the Gropius Bau) to address her own inner fears and anxieties.
During the performance "Abortion" (1989), she hung naked and upside down for nearly two hours, tied to a corset, to highlight the suffering associated with having an abortion, which is still illegal in Korea.
Lee Bul continued to gain prominence with her provocative work through the mid-1990s, a decade that marked a new shift as the artist moved away from performance and produced three-dimensional sculptural works.
The "Cyborg" (1997- 2011) series from these times (some of these pieces are also suspended from the ceiling of the exhibition space at the Gropius Bau) is particularly interesting.
The artist came up with gynoids that she considered as extravagant hybrids as they combined human bodies with machine parts; the figures also called to mind the heroines of Japanese manga and anime with sexually-charged bodies. The pieces were left incomplete, though, they missed heads or limbs suggesting that the notion of the "perfect" figure was still undergoing a process of transformation.
As the years passed Lee Bul experimented with different materials such as silk, leather and mother-of-pearl, crystals, velvet, stainless steel, aluminum chains, copper and PVC, that she used for her paintings and wall-mounted works like Untitled (Silk Painting – Yellow), Untitled (Silk Painting – Black), Untitled (Mekamelencolia – Yellow Velvet # 1) and Untitled (Willing To Be Vulnerable – Velvet # 6), shown in this exhibition for the first time.
In 2005 a new inspiration entered into Lee Bul's practice – modernist architecture. Yet, rather than using it to create proper buildings, the artist came up with imaginary works, utopian topographies that do not represent real places but emotional landscapes or metaphors for the networked, subterranean root-like systems of our cities.
Inspired by the architectural fantasies of German architect Bruno Taut - think about his "Alpinen Architektur" (1919) with buildings recalling enormous mountain ranges - Bul created immersive installations such as "Heaven and Earth" (2007), an imaginary landscape rising over a tiled bathtub, and "Bunker (M. Bakhtin)" (2007/2012), a black, rocky mountain with a cavernous interior that can be accessed through a large crevice and that transports visitors into a disorienting soundscape.
There are other spaces and installations designed to interrupt and disturb the visitors' sense of space with highly reflective surfaces covered with rows of lit up bulbs - the labyrinthine works "Via Negativa" (2012) and "Via Negativa II" (2014) - while the drawings included in all parts of the exhibition provide some order and an insight into Lee Bul's creative process, and could be considered as the background research for her three-dimensional works.
The largest works of art included in the Gropius Bau are "Willing To Be Vulnerable – Metalized Balloon" (2015-16), a 17-meter-long sculpture evoking the Hindenburg Zeppelin and referencing its disaster in 1937, and "Scale of Tongue".
Originally conceived as a form of portable architecture and recalling a boat's hull, an improvised shelter or a mountainous landscape, it subtly alludes to the Sewol ferry accident on 16 April 2014.
The exhibition also uncovers parallels between German and Korean history, there are indeed similarities when it comes to divisions and the process of reunification in the two countries.
In the post-war era, the Berlin Wall was erected directly alongside the north facade of the Gropius Bau that was therefore located near the border crossing and in the midst of political conflict. The works in "Crash" highlight instead how Korea's division and period of dictatorship impacted upon Lee Bul's works.
"I want to get across a sense of walking through time, through different periods," Lee Bul states in the press release accompanying the exhibition. "My works are a kind of journey to another place, another time. We travel, but the stories are in the landscape and you can see that it's always the same place. It's like a diorama: there is a journey, but it is always the same view. The same site."
The building of the Gropius Bau becomes therefore a symbolic space in which all divisions are neutralised through the works of an artist whose practice revolves around employing different media and materials in innovative ways to tackle contemporary themes and challenge preconceived notions.
Image credits for this post
Lee Bul, "Willing To Be Vulnerable - Metalized Balloon", 2015–2016
Exhibition view "Lee Bul: Crash", Gropius Bau
Photo: Mathias Völzke
Lee Bul, "Titan", 2013, "Willing To Be Vulnerable - Metalized Balloon", 2015–2016
Exhibition view "Lee Bul: Crash", Gropius Bau
Photo: Mathias Völzke
Lee Bul, "Mon grand récit: Weep into stones...", 2005
Exhibition view "Lee Bul: Crash", Gropius Bau
Photo: Mathias Völzke
Lee Bul, "Mon grand récit: Weep into stones...", 2005
Exhibition view "Lee Bul: Crash", Gropius Bau
Photo: Mathias Völzke
Lee Bul, "Monster Black", 1998-2011, "Monster Pink", 1998-2011
Exhibition view "Lee Bul: Crash", Gropius Bau
Photo: Mathias Völzke
Lee Bul, "Heaven and Earth", 2007, "Sternbau No. 2", 2007
Exhibition view "Lee Bul: Crash", Gropius Bau
Photo: Mathias Völzke
Lee Bul, "Heaven and Earth", 2007
Exhibition view "Lee Bul: Crash", Gropius Bau
Photo: Mathias Völzke
Lee Bul, "After Bruno Taut (Devotion to Drift)", 2007
Exhibition view "Lee Bul: Crash", Gropius Bau
Photo: Mathias Völzke
Lee Bul, "Bunker (M. Bakhtin)", 2007
Exhibition view "Lee Bul: Crash", Gropius Bau
Photo: Mathias Völzke
Lee Bul, "Via Negativa II", 2014
Exhibition view "Lee Bul: Crash", Gropius Bau
Photo: Mathias Völzke
Lee Bul, "Via Negativa II", 2014
Exhibition view "Lee Bul: Crash", Gropius Bau
Photo: Mathias Völzke
Lee Bul, "Via Negativa II", 2014
Exhibition view "Lee Bul: Crash", Gropius Bau
Photo: Mathias Völzke
Lee Bul, "Civitas Solis II", 2014, "Infinite Starburst of Your Cold Dark Eyes", 2009
Exhibition view "Lee Bul: Crash", Gropius Bau
Photo: Mathias Völzke
Lee Bul, "Untitled (Cravings Red)", 2011 (reconstruction of 1988 work)
Fabric, fibre filling, wooden frame, stainless steel carabiner, stainless-steel chain, acrylic paint, 180 x 158 x 130 cm
Photo: Jeon Byung-cheol, photo courtesy: Studio Lee Bul
Lee Bul, "Untitled (Cravings Red)", 2011, "Untitled (Cravings Grey)", 2011, "Untitled (Cravings Black)", 2011 (reconstruction of 1988 work)
Exhibition view "Lee Bul: Crash", Gropius Bau
Photo: Mathias Völzke
Lee Bul, "Cyborg W1-W4", 1998, "Transcription (Drift & Scatter)", 2006
Exhibition view "Lee Bul: Crash", Gropius Bau
Photo: Mathias Völzke
Lee Bul, "Amaryllis", 1999
Exhibition view "Lee Bul: Crash", Gropius Bau
Photo: Mathias Völzke
Lee Bul, "Scale of Tongue", 2017-2018
Exhibition view "Lee Bul: Crash", Gropius Bau
Photo: Mathias Völzke
Lee Bul, "Untitled (Mekamelencolia - Yellow Velvet #1)", 2016
Exhibition view "Lee Bul: Crash", Gropius Bau
Photo: Mathias Völzke
Lee Bul, "Plexus", 1997-1998
Exhibition view "Lee Bul: Crash", Gropius Bau
Photo: Mathias Völzke
Lee Bul, "Untitled (Willing To Be Vulne-rable – Velvet #6 DDRG24OC)", 2017
Mother of pearl, acrylic paint, PVC pa-nel, acrylic panel and collage on silk velvet, 96 x 130 cm
Photo courtesy: Studio Lee Bul
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