From Me, Belongs to You Only
Over the past twenty-five years, Lee Bul’s art career has borne witness to the global Asian art boom. In the 1990s, she was one of the best-known ‘Asian women artists’, at a time when there were few to be found in international museums. As her recent mid-career retrospective at the Mori Art Museum puts forward, there is also a synchronicity to be found between the chronology of Lee’s art practice and South Korea’s emergence from military dictatorship into a democracy. However, as Lee expressed in a recent interview, she does not consider herself a political person.1 She does not believe in any ‘isms’.
Nevertheless, curator Mami Kataoka uses this shared chronology between the artist and her country to identify, in Lee’s works, an increasingly complex questioning of the theme of collective ideologies and ‘isms’. Lee grew up in a family of anti-government activists, an environment in which the artist would have been exposed to politics from a young age. As she graduated from art school in 1987, South Korea was on the brink of reform. As Kataoka points out, the year of Lee’s graduation was also the year South Korea declared itself a republic. It was an uneasy time of demonstrations and competing ideologies.
After an early career consisting mainly of performance, Lee progressed to a number of figurative sculpture projects. The Cyborg series of sculptures, made during the first years of the new century, are the culmination of her critique of bodily improvement. The most interesting part of body modification for Lee, especially female bodies, is the line between improvement and destruction. In works such as Cyborg W4 (1998), Lee has created an artwork that not only strives