Lee Bul was born on January 25, 1964, in Yeongju, Gyeongsangbuk-do, South Korea. Raised by politically active parents while her country was under the rule of Park Chung Hee, Lee as a child witnessed a dramatically changing society from its margins, where she and her family repeatedly uprooted and relocated.^[1] After receiving B. F. A. in sculpture^[2] from Hongik University, Seoul, in 1987, Lee she was briefly involved in the Museum Group,^[1] alongside artists such as Choi Jeong Hwa. Although she has figured among "New Generation" artists (also called the "3-8-6" generation, with the 3 referring to a generation, born in the 1960s, who went to university in the 1980s), the art historian Yeon Shim Chung has argued that Lee's artistic trajectory diverged at an early stage away from the oft-travelled artistic routes of her time.^[1]

As Lee embarked on her own independent artistic practice, she pivoted sharply away from the cold, hard materials that founded her training in sculpture (namely, wood, stone, and metal).^[1] For her early performances in the 1990s, Yi Bul made sculptural creations made of fabric that connoted fleshy appendages and monstrously fantastical animals—and then wore them, and took to the streets of cities such as Seoul and Tokyo.

Lee received an initial wave of wide recognition for her Majestic Splendor series (1991), which were installations of decomposing fish decorated with sequins within clear Mylar bags that explored themes of beauty, vulnerability, decay and dread.^[3] A prolific material of Korea's textile industry, sequins connoted personal associations for Lee; her mother worked from home to craft bags and other accessories,^[1][4] which surrounded Lee throughout her childhood.

I Need You (Monument) edit

From 1996 and 1999, Lee completed three mixed media installations that incorporate photographs of the artist with large scale inflatable forms. One of these installations, titled I Need You (Monument) (1996), features a swelling, phallic object with a photograph of an orientalize and lingerie-clad Lee on the front. Beneath the mass lies an array of pedals for viewers to further aerate the object. Notable is Lee's juxtaposition of title and medium, which contrasts the vulnerability of inflatables with futile attempts to transcend history.^[5]

Majestic Splendor edit

A work that has been exhibited globally across multiple iterations, Lee first presented Majestic Splendor in 1991 in Seoul. Majestic Splendor features several real dead fish that are decorated with sequins, beads, and other small, sparkly items. They are placed in plastic bags and pinned to the wall of the gallery in a grid pattern. Over the course of the exhibition, the work emits a putrid odor. In 1997, during the Projects showing at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Majestic Splendor had to be removed because of its stench. After this Lee began using potassium permanganate, which is combustible, to help neutralize the smell.

Cyborg series edit

Lee Bul's Cyborg series (1997-2000) was first exhibited at the Artsonje Center in Seoul, Korea in 1998. Its techno-anthropomorphic bodies did not have a distinct biological gender, but seemed to possess female, hourglass shapes. A monster, titled Monster: Black (1998), a pile of excrement with multiple tentacles stands between them, which serves as a seven-foot tidal wave that towers over the sleek figures. Human and machine forms merge to give birth to a third. Female accentuated and idealized forms in ancient Greek culture, sexual charge of Japanese manga. Simultaneously well-proportioned, sensuous, and fragmented, the Cyborg works rose as symbols of human imperfection, despite the biological and cyber nature to transcend physical and mental limitations.^[6] The cyborgs, W1-W4, for instance, are four white figures hang from the ceiling, casting ghostly shadows. The headless, one-armed and one-legged figures are provocatively sexualized, with waists, breasts and buttocks accentuated by the armor-like corsets that don them. Lee has stated, "There's a very strange, ambivalent mixture of nostalgia for an impossible purity... and a dread of uncontrollable and potentially destructive sexual energy and power sublimated into the forms of machines.” ^[7] Merging human and machine boundaries, the cyborg invokes the human experience induced by technological object and artist.^[8]

Lee Bul's cyborgs represent tropes for fear and fascination with "the uncategorizable, the uncanny,” in her words.^[8] Although her cyborgs stick to a coherent form in Amaryllis (1999), Supernova and Crysallis (2000), they have a disconnect from the viewer for their paradoxical characteristics: “male and female,” “glorious and sinister,” “familiar and alien,” “grotesque and strangely seductive.” ^[8]

In 1998, Lee was selected as one of six shortlisted artists, including Huang Yong Ping, William Kentridge, Pipilotti Rist, Lorna Simpson and the eventual winner, Douglas Gordon, for the Hugo Boss Prize.^[9]

In 2014, Lee won the Noon Award at Gwangju Biennale.^[10][11]

Lee has had solo exhibitions worldwide including Live Forever which toured the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York and The Power Plant in Toronto. She was selected as a finalist for the 1998 Hugo Boss Prize by the Guggenheim Museum, New York.

Other museums that have presented exhibitions of her work include Fondation Cartier, Paris;^[12] Domus Artium, Salamanca; Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney; Japan Foundation, Tokyo; MAC, Musée d'Art Contemporain, Marseille; Le Consortium;^[13] Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philadelphia;^[14] Kunsthalle Bern, Switzerland; and the Museum of Modern Art, New York.^[15]

Her two-person exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, was titled Projects 57, Bul Lee, Matsui Chie was held in 1996. Bul Lee and Matsui Chie were presented as avant-garde female artists who were using installation art to challenge social norms.^[16]

In March 2010, the Hara Museum ARC unveiled a permanent installation by Lee Bul entitled A Fragmentary Anatomy of Every Setting Sun. In February 2012, Tokyo's Mori Art Museum mounted a mid-career survey exhibition, the artist's largest exhibition to date.^[17]

The Southbank Centres newly reopened Hayward Gallery hosted a survey of Lee's artists work beginning at the end of May 2018, her first in London; which explores the artist's extensive investigation into the body and its relationship to architectural space. Occupying the entire gallery, this exhibition includes documentation of early performances, sculptural works from the iconic Monster, Cyborg and Anagram series and recent immersive installations, as well as a selection of the artist's studio drawings.^[18][19]

In November 2020, an exhibition of the artist's work opened at St. Petersburg's Manege Central Exhibition Hall, 'marking a first-time encounter between Lee Bul's works and those by artists of the Russian avant-garde that influenced them.'^[20]

The Metropolitan Museum of Art (The Met) in New York announced in November 2023 that four new sculptures by Lee will be installed at its façade. Titled The Facade Commission: Lee Bul, the commission represents Lee's first major project in the United States since her 2002 solo exhibition at the New Museum.^[21] The works will be on view from 12 September in 2024 to 27 May 2025.^[22]

Solo exhibitions edit

*denotes a two-person show

Lee's works have been broadly exposed in art fairs around the world. In the recent STPI show in Singapore in 2023,^[31] the organiser presented the artist's solo exhibition, Lee Bul: Prints, curated by Xiaoyu Weng.^[32] Over 60 works across five new series were mounted by STPI Creative Workshop & Gallery.

In 2019 at Art Basel Hong Kong, Lee presented a new version of her replica Zeppelin "Willing To Be Vulnerable - Metalized Balloon" (2019) exhibited in 2018 in Hayward Gallery in London.^[33]

Lee's works have been sold at auctions, and the artist is represented by Lehmann Maupin and Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac respectively.^[34]

• Lee Bul studio