Lee Bul

One of the most prominent artist to emerge from South Korea in recent decades, Lee Bul follows her preoccupation with the human body across mediums, creating performances, paintings, and sculpture that often straddle the line between the anthropomorphic and the mechanical. For her Cyborg series (1997-2000), Lee drew inspiration from the machine aesthetic of early 20th-century Modernism, suspending fragmentary female bodies from the ceiling; another series of sinewy, chandelier-like works are draped in glass and acrylic beads, offering a more abstract counterpart to the figurative cyborgs. Hovering on the fringe of dissolution, Lee's sculptures seem to have emerged from a surreal, hyper-industrialized future.

Born into the military dictatorship of Park Chung-hee, Lee made her study of sculpture an outlet for her dissidence. Frustrated by the aesthetic of Realism and Minimalism, she sought to develop a new visual syntax of her own that could address how the political, technological, and personal intersected. Her performance pieces of the late '80s revolved around the human body, a theme that reemerged and is carried through her sculptural works, in which non-figurative pieces engage the viewer's bodies through their striking viscerality and presence.

Bul has been featured in exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, Kunsthalle Bern, Switzerland, Musée d’Art Contemporain, Marseille, New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, Le Consortium, Dijon, France, Japan Foundation, Tokyo, The Power Plant, Toronto, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, and Fondation Cartier, Paris, among others. She represented South Korea at the 48th Venice Biennale and received an Honorable Mention. She also participated in the 10th Gwangju Biennale in 2014 and received the Noon Award for most experimental work embodying the theme of the biennale.