Art in Japan>Contemporary Art 1930-2004>Lee Bul: Cyborgs

Original articles on art, artists, architecture, exhibitions, galleries, museums and cultural institutions around Tokyo, Japan.

Lee Bul: Cyborgs

by John McGee

SCAI the Bathhouse looks like a cyborg assembly plant. Two white, life-size, half-finished female robot figures dangle from the high ceiling of this former sento. Perhaps they are awaiting repair or further processing—each figure is outfitted with protective hardware and giant boots, but has only one leg, one arm and no head. 

Or is this a museum of cyborg archeology? Three rough-hewn female torsos rest on pedestals like fragments from a Greek temple. Translucent lollipop-pink and yellow epoxy mini-cyborgs—also headless and missing limbs—recline like Southeast Asian Buddhas. Either way, these sculptures by Korean artist Lee Bul raise issues of human evolution, emerging technology and the meaning or value of an ideal body. 

Lee’s work usually touches on feminist issues. She often deals with women’s place in society, especially Korean and Asian society, and the way popular culture formulates and alters opinions of feminine beauty. In an infamous example, she caused a stink at New York’s MOMA in 1997 when she displayed a series of decomposing fish covered in sequins—referencing both traditional "women’s work" and the struggle to artificially maintain beauty against the decay of age. 

Growing up in Korea, Lee was influenced by the perfect-bodied superhumans of anime. In a recent interview, Lee said, "I’m always concerned with notions about extension of [the] human body, substitution of [the] human body, transcending the flesh and the desire for immortality..." 

Lee says there are two ways she thinks about her cyborgs. First, she says, "they are incomplete bodies in a sense, questioning the myth of technological perfection..." And second, she wants to "invoke archetypal images of women, art-historical representations of femininity, particularly in Western art history." The imperfect plastic and polyurethane surfaces of these kind of clunky designs effectively raise both issues. They might be on their way to full production or they might be from the factory reject pile, like failed plaster copies of the Venus de Milo outside an ornamental garden supply shop.

In the past, Lee has also constructed a number of giant monster sculptures—biomorphic shapes sprouting tentacles and hair from insectoid joints. In this show, parts of these monsters are depicted in a series of small pencil and eye shadow drawings. 

Lee lives and works in Seoul.

This exhibition was held Nov-Dec 2001 at SCAI the Bathhouse (Shiraishi Contemporary Art Inc.), in Yanaka, Tokyo, Japan.

©2006 John McGee

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