From her earliest beginnings in the late 1980s, when she rose to prominence with body-based performances aimed at scandalizing South Korea’s patriarchal respectability, Lee Bul established herself as one of the country’s most provocative contemporary artists—not only for pushing the boundaries between mediums but also for her unfiltered artistic experiments, which doubled as political gestures against the contradictions of Korea’s conservative society and of our time. From those early performances exposing the female condition in a post-dictatorship, male-dominated South Korea, she moved in the 1990s toward futuristic soft sculptures and cyborg forms, merging eroticism, technology and dystopian critique. The result is a pioneering, visionary and often cryptic multimedia lexicon that seems to belong to a future dimension, already estranged from the tragedies and issues of our present.
While the artist rarely accepts interviews, Observer secured one on the occasion of her milestone career survey, “Lee Bul: from 1988 to Now,” which recently opened at Leeum Museum alongside Frieze Seoul and runs through January 4, 2025. When the answers arrived, I was hardly surprised by the cryptic language she used—closer to divinatory epigrams from a future cyborg version of herself than to conventional responses—yet they were profoundly illuminating, echoing the truths already woven into the exhibition. Her reaction to our questions confirmed I was, at least, on the right path: “Please let the writer know that she is such an insightful viewer that my response may be unnecessary,” she wrote. “The questions reflect my intentions, so I am confident she will understand my perspective. If my responses are used for a review, these keywords alone should sufficiently convey my thoughts.”
When I visited her studio a few years ago during the first edition of Frieze Seoul, it was evident that Bul was not one for many words. Like most visionaries, she follows images and intuitions that demand translation into forms already ahead of, or beyond, the reach of codification and language. Her studio is less a workplace than a laboratory of matter in motion—a maze of maquettes, drawings and studies, where fragments of ideas find new reassemblies and mutations in a potentially endless process of interrogation, signification and visualization.
Fresh off her Met Facade Commission in New York, Bul’s exhibition at the Leeum Museum presents an expansive journey through the many phases of her futuristic “Grand Narrative.” Co-curated with M+, it is the most comprehensive survey of her career to date, spanning more than four decades from the 1980s to the present. Yet the show is conceived less as a chronological overview than as a spectacular installation, a Gesamtkunstwerk that choreographs disparate works into a space that resists logical sequence.
Notably, no captions guide the visitor toward a coherent path. The absence of a script feels like the only faithful way to approach Bul’s practice, which is fundamentally a relentless act of “world-building”—never arriving at a final product or solution but instead crafting an ever-evolving universe that mirrors unstoppable technological innovation; interrogates shifting relationships between humanity, nature and machine; and speculates on dystopian horizons alongside the possibility of alternative futures. Bul opted for a nonlinear, multilayered structure for the show, which she called “Via Negativa.” The structure of this survey resists fixed hierarchies of center and periphery, resulting in a “Mannerist labyrinth,” or a path of paradoxes and new possibilities of interpretation that intentionally blurs all boundaries between beginning and end.
On the first floor, Bul plays with reflections and alternative dimensions in her immersive installation Civitas Solis II. The mirror-covered floor fragments reality and the body, creating a disrupted perception of space and time—a mesmerizing sensorial and narrative confusion that, paradoxically, opens up new possibilities and reframes the entire meaning-making process. The work was inspired by Civitas Solis, a 17th-century treatise in which Italian theologian and philosopher Tommaso Campanella envisioned a “radiant utopia.” Here, that shimmering promise of an ideal society is revealed also as a possible trap, an alluring illusion that can open the way to absolute control.
“This first chapter is about the ‘Reconsideration of (reality) perception,’” Bul responded when asked what she wanted to achieve and what kind of reaction she hoped to trigger in the viewer. The mirrors scattered across the floor catch, project and distort the light of more than 260 LED bulbs, manifesting both the seductive promise and the latent threat implied in multiple possible paths of choice. The space opens more questions than answers, yet also offers the possibility of contemplating alternative notions of reality—beyond the traditionally linear classifications of time and space that have long guided, and often misguided, our model of civilization.
In the exhibition’s lower level, Bul immerses visitors in her studies and constructions—the vital core of her practice—where the emphasis lies far more on process than on results. With maquettes suspended in almost architectural arrangements, the exhibition becomes a living extension of her studio, which she described as a “procession of practice to reflect on a subject.” Once again, Bul privileges inquiry over resolution, formulating hypotheses rather than final truths about the nature of any given “subject.” Her unrelenting mind, in constant dialogue with shifting circumstances and phenomena, forces us to reconsider everything from alternate perspectives.
Works like Infinite Starburst of Your Cold Dark Eyes, an uncanny assemblage where urban detritus such as stainless steel, mirrors, wood and aluminum—fragments of contemporary urban architecture—collide and entangle into a fragile new body, expose the mechanical failures and catastrophic disasters implied in a single-direction idea of collective progress, and reveal how the human side of our existence most often becomes its victim.
Overall, the show reveals more about her approach to art than any traditional survey could, even though some of her most seminal works are not necessarily here. Bul often operates as much like a researcher or engineer as an artist, creating and testing hypotheses for alternative human constructions and new relationships with the surrounding environment. “The main fiction of art is (C)reation,” she responded when asked the biggest existential question for all artists and creators: what is the final fiction of art, particularly its role in today’s society.
From the beginning, Lee Bul has embraced speculative fiction as her primary artistic strategy, one that proves productive in both political and philosophical spheres, probing past, present and future simultaneously while moving beyond conventional or imposed narratives. Continuously oscillating between techno-dystopian and techno-utopian engineering, the “fiction of art” enables her to address and restage sensitive political and sociocultural issues while testing alternative, generative epistemologies that resist censorship, control and the sanitization of late-stage capitalism and neoliberalism.
Hybridity is another recurring concept in Bul’s work—her practice tests and embraces a continuous hybridization between materials, species, bodies and machines, digital and physical space. Drawing inspiration from advanced technologies, science fiction, visual references from cinema and art history, as well as Japanese and Korean animation, Bul has been developing her Cyborg series since the late 1990s, investigating new forms of life emerging from the fusion of body and machine. Notably, these creatures often blend reminiscence of classical statuary beauty with the clean, smooth aesthetic of advanced technologies, embracing an idealized vision of technological progress as bodily enhancement while exposing the threats of absolute control, psychological fragmentation and automatization imposed by a fully roboticized existence.
Also here are works like her Anagram series, which appear to fuse the dualities embodied by her earlier Cyborg series and Monster works: here, elements of the human body, animals, plants and mechanical parts are dismembered and recombined into fluidly hybrid forms.
“Humans are connection,” she responded when asked what this notion means in relation to humanity’s future. This brief yet incisive statement could not be more resonant, particularly after my recent reading of Yuk Hui’s essay In Defence of Technological Pluralism, published in the first issue of GONG, a new niche magazine launched in Hong Kong. In the essay, Hui argues that the most radical shift in our relationship with technology—the true “technological challenge” of our time—is that tech, humanity’s techné, has become the substrate of our social, economic, political and aesthetic lives, to the point of generating an entirely new form of human consciousness, or an extension and integration of it, which he describes as the noosphere. “We must recognize that technological imagination is no longer only about improving an existing product or inventing a new one, but rather developing new nomos for the digital Earth,” he writes.
These reflections offered illuminating ways to approach Bul’s practice—as an exercise in testing and exploring the integrated connections between human consciousness and imagination, their technological extensions and the restructuring of knowledge and human interaction with the environment. According to Hui, as the digital Earth turns the noosphere into the true battlefield of politics and ideology, we must now consider the future through the vital intersections of technodiversity, noodiversity and biodiversity—on which, ultimately, human survival depends.
No matter how monstrous or haunting Lee Bul’s works may appear, there is a relentless underlying optimism that animates her research—a faith in human inventiveness and our capacity to imagine and build new worlds, a belief that technology can still be used in better ways and the conviction in technological pluralism as a platform for rethinking the vital interconnections between the world and human existence in other possible forms, as Hui also suggests. Lee Bul’s work inhabits the same key tension that defines our time more than ever: between utopian aspiration—the drive to transcend earthly limits and reach for a better future—and failed futures, marked by the collapse of political and technological utopias.
Even in this show, her installations and architectural models constantly negotiate between different visions of modernity and their inevitable failures. Series like Mon grand récit (2005), whose main maquette is placed at the entrance, splice fragments of utopian architecture—Le Corbusier, Tatlin and Korean modernist ambitions—into precarious structures, beautiful yet unstable. No single ideology or master plan can hold. And yet, space remains for planning, imagining, engineering and using technology to design better versions of the present’s failures. Illuminating this dystopian urban model is a neon-lit, fragmented slogan Bul borrowed from The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles, contemplating the inexhaustibility of life as it becomes perceivable because of the uncertainty of death.
“Might be the destiny of humanity – To the present,” was Bul’s response, when asked which side will prevail at this point in her career and human civilization. Where the gleaming, massive 17-meter-long silver airship at the entrance of the show is taking us will ultimately depend on how we choose to confront our present.
More in Artists
-
At PPOW, Erin M. Riley Weaves Her Own Story
-
How Niki de Saint Phalle Built Her Art Empire
-
Ana María Caballero Wants to See Poetry Not Just Vindicated But Revalued
-
Beyond Times Square Sleaze: Jane Dickson Still Captures the Pulse of the City
-
Tammy Nguyen’s Layered Cosmology Collapses History Into Myth and Meaning
-
Isabella Ducrot’s Practice Remains Rooted in the Quiet Power of Materials
Want more insights? Join Working Title - our career elevating newsletter and get the future of work delivered weekly.
