about us
 
contact us
 
login
 
newsletter
 
facebook
 
 
home hongkong beijing shanghai taipei tokyo seoul singapore
more  
search     
art in seoul   |   galleries   |   artists   |   artworks   |   events   |   art institutions   |   art services   |   art scene

Enlarge
Lee Bul
by PKM Trinity Gallery
Location: PKM Trinity Gallery
Artist(s): LEE Bul
Date: 16 Sep - 15 Oct 2010

PKM Trinity Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of Lee Bul which brings together two new sculptures and a selection of drawings produced over the past several years providing fascinating insights into the intellectual and visual structures underlying the artist’s recent oeuvre.

Beginning around 2005, Lee Bul began an ambitious series of sculptures and related works on paper and canvas under a broad rubric titled “Mon grand récit”—slyly inverting Lyotard’s idea of the impossibility of “le grand récit,” or “the master narrative” of progress and liberation, in our age. Fusing the fractured tropes and narratives of collective utopian aspirations with the artist’s own experiences of coming of age in Korea during a period of turbulent social transformation, “Mon grand récit” constitutes a fiercely imaginative yet melancholic topography of what Lee sees as “the collapse and disintegration of progressivist projects to reinvent the world.” In the fall of 2007, Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, Paris, mounted a major solo exhibition showcasing these works.

A large suite of drawings, displayed in a separate room in the present show, were created as conceptual and spatial studies for the sculptural installation realized at the Fondation Cartier. Additional works on paper, created more recently, delve into metaphysical and poetic concepts of architectural environments, evoking invented and imaginary landscapes that seem haunted by specters of the historical avant-garde. Along with the two new sculptures, obsessively intricate structures made of glass, crystals, steel and aluminum—an homage to the visionary Weimar architect Bruno Taut’s (1880–1938) fantastic conceptions of glittering, crystalline cities suspended in mid-air—they constitute a deeply affecting visual meditation on the ruins of history, by turns seductive and haunting, sensuous and intellectually rigorous.

Born in Seoul in 1964, Lee Bul has been featured in solo exhibitions throughout the world, including the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, Paris (2007); Domus Artium, Salamanca (2007); Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney (2004); Centre for Contemporary Arts, Glasgow (2003); The Power Plant, Toronto (2002); MAC, Galeries Contemporaines des Musées de Marseille, Marseille (2002); and the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York (2002). In 1999 she was awarded a prize at the 48th Venice Biennale for her contribution to both the Korean Pavilion and the international exhibition in the Arsenale curated by Harald Szeemann. She was a finalist for the 1998 Hugo Boss Prize. In 1997, the MoMA, New York, commissioned the artist to create her signature installation of decomposing fish adorned with sequins for the museum’s Projects gallery. The exhibition was brought to a premature close, however, amid controversy over the work’s inescapable olfactory component.

Recent and current group exhibitions include “Transformation,” Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo; “Fantasmagoria, le monde mythique,” Les Abbatoirs, Toulouse; “New Décor,” Hayward Gallery, London; and “Morality Act VI: Remember Humanity,” Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam.

In November 2011, a travelling mid-career retrospective surveying Lee Bul’s work over the past two decades, curated by Mami Kataoka, will begin at the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo.

Digg Delicious Facebook Share to friend
 

© 2007 - 2024 artinasia.com