Suzanne Livingston on Lee Bul’s Amaryllis The advanced technologies' specialist discusses Bul's art
By Suzanne Livingston
Lee Bul’s work has always been an absolute feast – of sequins and stench, leather and wreckage, digits and Styrofoam, labyrinths and unease. There is order and logic, but there is also great intensity. Her art is alive and in action, producing dazzling, sometimes menacing visual effects. She has spoken of the "point of convulsion" where the forces of speed collapse, and evolution give rise to sprawling, extravagant, auto-produced forms. Perhaps that is why, when I first saw her work in person in London at the Hayward Gallery’s 2018 exhibition "Crashing", it felt like such a shock to the eyes. It was thrilling to see her art breathe, fizz and sprawl in a grand space. It was unctuous with life.
I had been interested in her practice for many years, engaged as she is in the very themes that have driven my own research – namely, cybernetics, power, and post-representational aesthetics. Lee is deeply respected, if not well known in every quarter, which has further driven my curiosity. (...)
This merging of the organic and inorganic, and the exposure of the contrived boundary between the two, has been central to my own practice as a curator – it subverts standard philosophical frameworks and takes us toward the outside and the uncategorizable. It is particularly significant that Lee explored this territory to challenge the oppressive power of the Korean dictatorship of the 1960s and 70s. In doing so, her work offers a powerful antidote to the accumulated toxins of provincial Western thinking, about art and AI as so much else.
In among the detonated power of many of her pieces, the one which has particularly fascinated me is from her "Anagram" series, Amaryllis (1999), which stands apart for being so calm, so weird and yet so refined. Like much of her approach, it is discomforting; yet, as it draws the viewer in, it also gives and gives. Sitting alongside her "Monster" and "Cyborg" series, for which she is most famous, "Anagram" explores objects and their parts in all manner of materials that can be joined together interchangeably. From my perspective, Amaryllis is her most beguiling individual work. It is shell, horn, tentacle; weed, synapse, mollusk; tuber, claw, and rhizome all at once. It is not just a conflation; it also breeds new functions. We can see its circuity, its bolts and rivets. (...)
Lee’s work is not just helpful in plotting new paths and ways of being through artificial intelligence. It also takes us beyond, into the world of artificial intelligence, where species themselves, in their molecular physicality, are altered to give, enhance, and extend existence. Lee raises powerful and ongoing questions about control, capitalism, utopia, and failure; but as she does so, she takes the future’s many wild possibilities and turns them into avenues of escape and appropriated power. (...)
