Past Solo Exhibition
Lee Bul: Prints 04.11.2023 — 23.12.2023
Information
Event has ended
4 November – 23 December 2023
About The Exhibition
Expanding her long-term pursuit in complicating the universalising belief of technocratic progress and continuous growth, Lee Bul: Prints features new works that anchor on a poignant and tactile sense of materiality. Through close collaboration with STPI – Creative Workshop & Gallery, Lee experiments with various techniques that both continue the printing tradition while challenging the conventional understanding of its production. Conceived during her residency in 2018, with production completed in 2023, these prints inherit various conceptual and formal elements from Lee’s ongoing practice.
The Untitled – SF series transforms Lee’s previous immersive installation’s spatial experience into rich, layered prints that incorporate various holographic foils. The depth and reflective quality of the images evoke the idea of a shattered mirror, commenting on the disorientation of the everyday urban life and the fragmentation of historical narrative. The Untitled – SI and Untitled – PI series are based on a drawing that Lee developed from a collage of cutout images of explosions and mushroom clouds. Using techniques such as photo etching and screenprinting with colour pigments and iron filings, the sets tease out a post-apocalyptical urban landscape where familiar yet wrecked city infrastructures overlap and superimpose. Untitled – CC features an abstract body that derives from Lee’s limbless Cyborg sculpture. In lieu of traditional ink, the process incorporated copper powder to produce a wide range of patina effects and visuals that invite imaginative readings. Additionally, at different locations throughout the exhibition space, one encounters small prints of zeppelins, a symbol that frequently appears in Lee’s oeuvre as a quintessential representation of utopian visions.
Distinct from standard print production where the edition is each a replica of the previous print, Lee’s series has no editions, with each work being an iteration and a variation. Each print exists as a storyline, bifurcating, multiplying, like a version of an imperfect memory of the others, with no origin to trace back to. Here, the art of storytelling is about repeating stories; not reciting them identically, but turning the same story into a new one with each telling.
– Xiaoyu Weng, exhibition cutator
About the artist
Lee Bul
Residency in 2018
Lee Bul (b. 1964, Yeongju, South Korea, based in Seoul, South Korea) has examined narratives of techno-optimism and utopia through her work over the past four decades. Informed by her upbringing as the daughter of dissidents during a period of political unrest, Lee takes a critical perspective towards systems of power and progress. She was one of the first South Korean artists to find an international platform in the 1990s, and continues to be known worldwide as a leading practitioner of her generation.
Working across a range of media from drawing and sculpture to video and installation, Lee’s influences include science fiction, modernist architecture and socio-political histories. For example, her feminised cyborg sculptures critique society’s desire for the “ideal” body through technological augmentations. In her works inspired by architecture, recurring motifs like fragmented mirrors reveal the dystopic decay behind humankind’s quest for perfection.
Lee obtained her BFA in Sculpture from Hongik University, Seoul in 1987. Her work is held in major collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Tate Modern, London; M+, Hong Kong; Mori Art Museum, Tokyo; QAGOMA, Brisbane; Art Sonje Center, Seoul; Leeum, Samsung Museum of Art, Seoul; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa. Notable solo exhibitions include My Grand Narrative (2025), Leeum Museum of Art, Seoul; Long Tail Halo (2024), Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Lee Bul (2023), Gothenburg Museum of Art; Beginning (2021), Seoul Museum of Art; City of the Sun (2019), SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah; and Connect 1: Still Acts (2016), Art Sonje Center, Seoul. The artist has also participated in major international festivals including Minds Rising, Spirits Turning (2021), 13th Gwangju Biennale; May You Live in Interesting Times (2019), 58th Venice Biennale; Beyond Bliss (2018), 1st Bangkok Art Biennale; The future is already here—it’s just not evenly distributed (2016), 20th Biennale of Sydney; Burning Down the House (2014), 10th Gwangju Biennale; Not Only Possible, But Also Necessary (2007), 10th Istanbul Biennial; dAPERTutto (1999), 48th Venice Biennale; and APT1 (1993), 1st Asia Pacific Triennial, Brisbane.
Lee had her residency at the STPI Workshop in 2018, resulting in the exhibition, Prints (2023), curated by Xiaoyu Weng.
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