Every conception of utopia, historically, harbors the contradictory seeds of its own disintegration. It speaks of its own impossibility. For me, utopia in its paradoxical essence is a nostalgic, even elegiac, idea. — Lee Bul
Thaddaeus Ropac Paris Marais presents an exhibition of new works by Korean artist Lee Bul. Over twenty paintings from two of the artist’s most recent series will be on display: the sensuous mother of pearl and acrylic Perdu works, and the fantastical Velvet collages made out of fragments of photographic material, paint and mother of pearl.
Lee Bul combines traditional methods and materials and a futuristic aesthetic in her work, exploring the notion of utopia in its imaginary potential to reveal its darker undertones. Born of dissident parents under the dictatorship of Park Chung-Chee, she draws on her childhood experiences, as well as European and South Korean culture, to create highly political works that resonate across time and history, while remaining wholly relevant to the present moment.
The Perdu works, presented in the main space of the gallery, exemplify Lee Bul’s approach by bringing together past, present and future temporalities through the materials and references they incorporate. Their title, ‘Perdu’, is an arcane military idiom used to describe a sentry assigned to a particularly remote and dangerous location. In this way, Lee Bul alludes to the outposts in the Demilitarised Zone that separates North and South Korea, and the current political climate of her country of origin.
Aesthetically, the Perdu series is based on the forms of cyborgs and chrysalids which she began drawing and sculpting in the 1990s, which engage with the gendering of technology, infusing distinctly feminine qualities into a male-dominated world. At the same time, Lee Bul’s cyborgs also offer a critique of modern Korean society, specifically, according to curator Doryun Chong, ‘the changing faces of the people who begin to look identical, like androids at the end of an assembly line in a factory.’ ‘Korea’s plastic surgery,’ he continues, is ‘an epidemic wholeheartedly embraced in the name of competitiveness and, to borrow the artist’s own key term, “perfectibility,” is now a globally infamous phenomenon.’
The technological subject matter of the Perdu works, is contrasted with mother of pearl: a traditional material that reminds the artist of the women she grew up with. As an immigrant of Japanese descent, Lee Bul’s mother could not find employment in the fraught political context of post-war South Korea. Instead, she turned to creating brightly coloured jewellery and clothing, from which Lee Bul derives her particular sense of colour and texture. ‘I use beads in my work because of such memories,’ she explains, ‘people are quick to associate them with decoration or luxury goods. For me, they represent hard labour.’
Upstairs, in the Velvet collages, Lee Bul constructs shimmering traceries and constellations from small pieces of photographs of her works, reference images and materials from her studio including paint and mother of pearl, which she applies onto rich grounds of silk velvet. The result is an intricate, phantasmagorical landscape with a crystalline architecture that might be found in a city of the future as much as it could belong to a long-forgotten underwater civilisation.
Throughout her practice, which spans three decades, the artist looks for references and materials that embody such contradictions. 'I choose what I work with very carefully,’ states the artist, ‘everything has connotations, stories and I utilise them.’ Mother of pearl and velvet in particular, which form the basis of the two series of works on show at Thaddaeus Ropac, interest Lee Bul because they ‘are related to organisms that come from the inside out.’ Despite its hard appearance, mother of pearl is found on the inside of shellfish, which produce the substance to repair wounds. Velvet, in turn, was originally produced to replace hair and fur in clothing, and is made out of silk, which is a secretion from worms. This makes them relevant for Lee Bul’s critique of utopia, whose ultimate failure she sees as inherent, coming from inside the notion itself.
Today, South Korea is a technological hub and cities like Seoul are seen as the archetype for the metropolis of the future. But the origins of the country’s economic boom, which started in 1961, are anchored in the dictatorship of Park Chung-Chee, who is often credited with setting Korea on its course from a developing country into one of the world’s wealthiest nations. Known as the Miracle on the Han River, this period of growth and development into which Lee Bul was born remains indissociable from the violence and repression of the regime. The artist carries this ambivalence throughout her oeuvre, which seems suspended in time and space, somewhere between dream, reality and nightmare. Far from detracting from their appeal, it is this underlying darkness that gives the delicate and fantastical Perdu and Velvet works their poignancy and their power.
About the artist
Lee Bul lives and works in Seoul, South Korea. Her 1997 installation Majestic Splendor at The Museum of Modern Art, New York used rotting fish encrusted in sequins as a commentary on the ephemeral nature of beauty and the powerlessness of women, causing a furore and establishing her international reputation as an emerging artist. In 1999, she was selected by curator Harald Szeemann to participate in the International Pavilion at the 48th Venice Biennale, where her work was also shown in the Korean Pavilion. Lee Bul has had solo exhibitions at the New Museum, New York (2002); Le Consortium Contemporary Art Center, Dijon (2002); Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney (2004); Fondation Cartier pour l'Art Contemporain, Paris (2007); Mori Art Museum, Tokyo (2012); Musée d'Art Moderne Grand Duc Jean, Luxembourg (2013); National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul (2014); and Ikon Gallery, Birmingham (2014). She has also been the subject of multiple exhibitions at Art Sonje, Seoul in 1998, 2012 and 2016.The Lee Bul retrospective, curated by Stephanie Rosenthal: Crashing, opened at the Hayward Gallery, London and travelled to the Gropius Bau, Berlin in 2018–19, followed by Utopia Saved at the Manege Central Exhibition Hall, St. Petersburg in 2020. Lee Bul received the Ho-Am Prize for The Arts in 2019, awarded to people of Korean heritage who have contributed to the enrichment of culture and arts for humankind.
