An excellent opportunity to be introducted to the work of Korean artist Lee Bul is coming up at the Hayward Gallery. Lee’s work explores the body, beauty, feminism, nature and technology – and perhaps she is best known for her giant cyborg body parts. This has got to be one of the events of the month. It is part of the South Bank’s Wide Open School season.
Lee Bul: From Me, Belongs to You Only
Friday 15 June, 7pm
Lee Bul seeks to share a feeling of intimacy and warmth with the audience in this lecture presenting her working processes as well as her major projects.
This illustrated lecture takes its title from a line in a love letter sent to Lee Bul. Wanting to share this feeling of intimacy and warmth with visitors to her retrospective, she used it as the title of her recent exhibition at the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo. In this lecture, she presents her working processes and all her major projects as presented in that exhibition. This lecture will be given in Korean with simultaneous English translation.
Hayward Gallery Lecture Theatre, £10
Approximate duration: 90 minutes
More info.Lee Bul
(b.1964, Yongwol, South Korea)
Featuring cyborgs and monsters and futuristic cityscapes, Lee Bul’s work explores dreams, ideals and utopias inspired by Japanese anime and manga, bioengineering, and visionary architecture. Her intricate sculptural installations combine new media and innovative technologies in what she describes as a ‘dream language that mediates between the unconscious and lived experience.’ From her earliest street performances, when she made and wore fantastic ‘soft sculpture’ costumes, alive with multiple protrusions and dangling viscera, Lee’s work has touched on feminist issues. She often questions women’s place in society, especially in Korea and Asia, and addresses the ways in which popular culture influences opinions of feminine beauty, both in the East and in the West. Later sculptures have analysed the relationship between woman and machine, producing aberrant hybrids that she calls ‘anagrammatical morphologies’, while the forms of Live Forever, a trio of fully functional karaoke pods, morph between prototypical racing cars and cryogenic chambers. In these works, Lee explains that her concern is with ideas about ‘transcending the flesh and the desire for immortality.’
Links:
- Book now on the South Bank website
- Lee Bul’s official website
- Lee Bul Pioneers Korean Contemporary Art, Cathy Rose A. Garcia, Korea Times, 5 Feb 2010