One of the most surprising things to emerge at Lee Bul’s Crash at Gropius Bau is just how all encompassing the South Korean artist’s output is. Her corpus is wide-ranging, spanning the visceral to the technologically inclined, the present to the future, and the political to the personal across performance, installation, sculpture, drawing and painting. What is also surprising — considering that her work is so bodily and politically engaged — is that she is not more widely known outside of her native country — or at least not since before her heavily Instagrammed exhibition, Crashing, at London’s Hayward Gallery, earlier this year. Although Crash encompasses a complete survey of her work, it somehow feels a lot more like a fresh discovery. There’s a sense that there is still so much more to be mined from Lee’s oeuvre, like treasure glistening in the dark depths of a lake.
Crash is an exhibition to linger over: take time to peer into the intricate details of the miniature models that punctuate the Bau’s spacious rooms, or study your own reflection in the multiple mirrored surfaces. Lee’s work oscillates between dreams and reality: large objects — notably the silver foil Zeppelin on the exhibition’s press material, or a massive transparent balloon twinkling with fairy lights — convey a sense of another time and place, evoking the bright possibilities of dreams, or as in the case of the airship, the failures of the past. In one room, towards the start of the exhibition, chalky-white cyborg models hover from the ceiling like eerie artefacts from a future we haven’t seen yet, themselves influenced by the speculative futurism of, say, Donna Harraway’s landmark essay, “A Cyborg Manifesto”. In recent years, her interest in designing prototypes has led her to configure utopian urban landscapes in miniature form, each one glittering with crystals and shards of mirror, or with spiralling white steps and walkways like model versions of a Star Wars film set.
What’s especially appealing about Lee’s work is her use of the body. Like Yayoi Kusama, she employs mirrors and bulb lights to create a heightened experience in a particular space. Meanwhile, her early performances — in which she wore lumpy, anthropomorphic costumes — are shocking corporeal interventions in public environments. One such performance, screened at Gropius Bau, Cravings (1989) is a particularly stirring example, where she awkwardly pulls herself down steps in a bulbous costume, all tails and flabby limbs. Meanwhile, in one of the exhibition’s most memorable installations, Thaw, the face of South Korea’s one-time military dictator, Park Chung Lee, is just about visible through a murky crystallised formation. Like many of Lee’s artworks, it provokes a double-take, combining troubling political discourse with vital sensation. With so much to uncover in this wide-ranging exhibition, SLEEK sat down with the exhibition’s curator — and the newly appointed director of Gropius Bau — Stephanie Rosenthal to discuss just what it is about Lee Bul’s work that makes it so endlessly fascinating.
What initially attracted you to curating an exhibition of Lee Bul’s work?
Bul is an artist I have followed for years, and who I was able to engage with closely after inviting her to exhibit her work in the turbine hall of Cockatoo Island during the Biennale of Sydney in 2016. Despite being known internationally, she hasn’t had a large retrospective in Germany or in the UK so I felt it is really time. Her body of work is conceptually very diverse, comprising of performance and installation art that explore dreams and utopias that are influenced by a combination of futurist theory and also science fiction. Importantly, she also voices the oppression and numbness, the physical pain and consequently the vulnerability that have shaped the times that she lived through.
How does the exhibition at Gropius Bau differ to the original exhibition at the Hayward Gallery? What challenges did you encounter?
The exhibitions at the Hayward and at the Gropius Bau are curated very differently, with the aim that it is more than a traveling exhibition – and one that resonates with the architecture of its location and one that shares themes that will connect with the audiences in these very different cities. At the Gropius Bau, Crash aims to take a much more political and historical direction, drawing parallels between German and Korean history and therefore pointing out the relevance of Bul’s work. This is especially important in the times we are living, where so much that we think about is related to the question of separation on a physical but also psychological and intellectual level. The curation will build a bridge between the historical location of Gropius Bau located next to the former Berlin Wall, and the divide experienced by Bul from Korea’s division and period of dictatorship. This time has greatly impacted her work, and will be made clear through her portrayal of emotional topographies and utopian architectural visions.
This exhibition is curated as a multi-sensory landscape. Can you discuss how the immersive installations operate in “Crash”?
Over the years, Bul’s architectural sculptures have grown and developed into visually immersive installations, large-scale landscapes that visitors can wander through. Some of these installations disrupt and disturb our sense of space through the use of highly reflective surfaces, like for example the labyrinthine work Via Negativa II (2014) or the sci-fi landscape composed of ice fold-like formations in Civitas Solis II (2014). Other works enforce an awareness of one’s own body by being just large enough for one person, like Bunker (M. Bakhtin) (2007/12), or Cella (2012–13). Bunker (M. Bakhtin) appears as a black rocky mountain with a cave-like interior that can be entered through a large fissure and immerses the visitor in a disorientating soundscape. Also as with the work Live Forever III (2001), these works have an intimate nature, almost like a second skin for the visitor.
Can you describe the varied use of materials, such as mother-of-pearl, crystals, leather, glass and velvet in Lee Bul’s work? What can be conveyed through the clashing use of textures and materials?
She has a profound and longstanding interest in experimenting with organic materials, which she selects for their close connection with the human body such as hair, velvet and leather). To name one example, she uses mother-of-pearl (the pearlescent interior of certain seashells) extensively, which carries the idea of turning the inside out into her paintings. These unusual juxtapositions of materials, for example precious silk velvet with matted strands of her own hair in paintings such as Untitled (Mekamelencolia – Yellow Velvet #1) (2016), create a fine balance between both beauty and abjection.
What’s the role of the “future”, technology and cyborgs in Lee Bul’s work?
Bul began her well-known series Cyborg (1997– 2011) in the mid-1990s to follow the pursuit of perfection by fusing humans and machines. In this series, every figure is in some way incomplete – their missing heads or limbs suggest that the notion of the “perfect” figure is still undergoing transformation. This examination of bodies, and the way society views them led her to explore models of utopian urban landscapes. In 2005 she began creating models inspired by modernist architectural designs. These topographies seem to expose the inner workings of her earlier works and become a metaphor for the networked, subterranean root-like systems of our cities, and furthermore for societies and their utopian ideas.
What and why is your favourite piece from the exhibition?
I do really love the Zeppelin in the Lichthof of the Gropius Bau. It creates a multilayered connection to the archaeological exhibition on the ground floor which in turn explores how technology has influenced development in earlier times.
How would you like visitors to perceive “Crash”?
With their body and their mind.
“Crash” curated by Stephanie Rosenthal runs until 13 January 2019.
All images courtesy of Gropius Bau. Photos by Mathias Völzke.