Every conception of utopia, historically, harbours the contradictory seeds of its own disintegration. It speaks of its own impossibility.
— Lee Bul
Lee Bul was born in 1964 of left-wing dissident parents under South Korea’s military dictatorship.
She draws on her childhood experiences, as well as European and South Korean culture, to create works that resonate across history, warning of the dangers that come with trying to build a perfect society.
Watch Lee Bul discuss her latest work and the exhibition
Lee Bul explores the notion of utopia in her work. The biomorphic figures in the Perdu series, like the crystalline architectures of the Velvet collages, seem suspended somewhere between the far-away past and the not-so-distant future. As the artist explains: ‘For me, utopia in its paradoxical essence is a nostalgic, even elegiac, idea.’
In this technologised world, we become robots and the architectonics we build become organic life forms.
— Doryun Chong, M+ Hong Kong Chief Curator, 2018
Lee Bul brings together different temporalities in her work, drawing parallels between contemporary events and past literary references.
The title of the series, ‘Perdu’, from the French word meaning ‘lost’, is a reference to French writer Marcel Proust’s celebrated novel À la Recherche du Temps Perdu (1913), which speaks about memory and explores what it means to be an artist.
At the same time, the word is used in the military to describe a sentry who is posted in a particularly remote and dangerous location, recalling the demilitarised zone between North and South Korea.
The process of making the Perdu works is an intricate one and each painting takes two months to make. One after the other, the artist superimposes various shades of acrylic paint mixed with stone powder and waits for them to dry, before sanding down the surface strategically to create a marbled effect. The well-defined lines of the underlying drawing are preserved with a laser-cut foam structure until the base of the work is ready, after which Lee Bul fills in the lines, repeating the layering process with contrasting colours. Among the paint, she mixes flecks of mother of pearl, which give the surface a glittering effect as they catch the surrounding light.
Perdu CXX, 2021
Mother of pearl, acrylic paint on wooden base panel, stainless steel frame
Diptych: 226 x 163 x 6.5 cm (88.98 x 64.17 x 2.56 in)
Perdu CXIX, 2021
Mother of pearl, acrylic paint on wooden base panel, stainless steel frame
Diptych: 226 x 163 x 6.5 cm (88.98 x 64.17 x 2.56 in)
I choose what I work with very carefully. Everything has connotations, stories, and I utilise them. I borrow the general meanings materials have and embrace them in my work.
— Lee Bul
The materials Lee Bul uses and the associations they carry are one of the most important aspects of her work. ‘Materials that are related to organisms that come from the inside out, interest me,’ explains the artist. Like velvet, which is a secretion from a worm, mother of pearl is produced by molluscs to repair their wounds. That such a beautiful substance might be a result of pain gives it a power and a poignancy that underlies all of Lee Bul’s delicate and sensuous works.
Perdu CXXIV, 2021
Mother of pearl, acrylic paint on wooden base panel, stainless steel frame
163 x 113 x 6.5 cm (64.17 x 44.49 x 2.56 in)
Perdu CXVII, 2021
Mother of pearl, acrylic paint on wooden base panel, stainless steel frame
Triptych: 83.3 x 189.5 x 6.6 cm (32.8 x 74.61 x 2.6 in)
Lee Bul works on the Velvet collages alone. Each one takes her weeks and even months to complete. The artist selects photographs of her sculptures and installations, layering them with source imagery and fragments of material from her studio, as well as intricate, laser-cut pieces of crystal and mother of pearl. She applies the elements onto a rich ground of silk velvet, creating phantasmagorical landscapes with crystalline architectures that might be found in a city of the future as much as they could belong to a long-forgotten underwater civilisation.
In this work, one can make out various elements from Lee Bul’s installation Willing To Be Vulnerable, which she presented at the 2016 Sydney Biennale. These include a hot air balloon, a Zeppelin and metal towers, referencing utopian projects that ultimately failed to revolutionise society.
Untitled (Willing To Be Vulnerable - Velvet #19), 2021
Mother of pearl, acrylic paint, collage on silk velvet
147 x 197 x 12 cm (57.87 x 77.56 x 4.72 in)
Mother of pearl is a medium in its own right for Lee Bul, ‘just like paint’. Different molluscs in different countries produce different colours of mother of pearl and the artist selects the various shades for her Velvet collages as one would from a palette. The substance, which is used in traditional Korean lacquerware, is also linked to the Haenyeo ‘sea women’, female divers who harvest shells, seaweed and other sea life from the ocean.
Lee Bul’s work knowingly embraces the human urge to attempt impossible tasks.
— Skye Sherwin, The Guardian, 2018
