《Lee Bul––Beginning》 is an exhibition concentrating on the internationally active artist Lee Bul’s first decade of artistic formation, in which her ‘soft sculpture’ and ‘performance documentations’ were extensively produced. From the late 1980s to the 1990s in South Korea, when Lee Bul in her 20s started her career, was a historical turning point as well as a period of clash of flourishing popular culture, the wave of globalization, anxiety about the end of the century and hope for the new one. This exhibition centers performances that resulted from contexts of the era and presents Lee Bul’s various formative works and documents less known so far, ranging from sculpture and drawings to mockups and objects that deliver the artist’s artistic thoughts and explorative processes. Lee Bul’s work prominently uses symbols captured through exploring the inside and the outside of the body, the androcentric legacy of modernism and ideologies of Korean modernization. These motives reveal the clash of meanings between beauty, ugliness, life, death, mind, body, light and shadow. By projecting biased external gazes on society, politics, gender, class and ethnicity, her works traverse given borders. The exhibition revisits the artist’s starting point to create a new tension between two perspectives anchored in the past and the present. This narrative of return not only enriches the interpretation of Lee Bul’s artistic practice but also projects our current view over it so as to pose a few questions still valid to us.

Further Information
SeMA