Lee Bul South Korea’s Provocateur, Ruffles the Met’s Staid Niches
By Martha Schwendener
“I have many mothers,” the South Korean artist Lee Bul said as she stood in the Louise Bourgeois painting exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum in 2022. The curator Lesley Ma, who was there with her, related this anecdote to a packed auditorium on a recent evening when Lee’s four sculptures, titled “Long Tail Halo,” opened to the public. They are the fifth edition of a commission for a contemporary artist to fill the niches on the Met’s facade.
We all have many mothers and fathers and others who’ve guided us in the paths we’ve chosen in life. This is the perfect statement for Lee, who for four decades has, like Bourgeois, pushed the boundaries of the human body in art.
After graduating from art school in Seoul in 1987, Lee made “Cyborg” sculptures that fantastically reconfigured the human body, and gave guerrilla performances on the streets. Some of these protested a repressive regime in South Korea but also the country’s abortion policy. For the New Museum in New York in 2002, she offered wild karaoke “pods” that challenged the viewer to participate. “I felt like I could change the world,” she recently told my colleague Andrew Russeth, in a New York Times profile.
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Here, there are two different types of sculptures. The outer two niches feature icy white and silver faceted forms, almost like abstract prisms, tumbling gently away from the building and toward the viewer. The northern sculpture, titled “Long Tail Halo: The Secret Sharer III” (2024), resembles a Cubist canine with forms spilling out of its head, as though the creature were vomiting artifacts.
(What you’re looking at is actually a steel armature with a kind of vinyl acetate skin stretched over it, but you’ll have to use your phone and zoom in a bit to see all of these details.) The title “Long Tail Halo” doesn’t mean anything in particular, according to the artist, but conjures a sense of time and space and the aura of these objects, which can be seen at night, in the rain or snow, at sunset and sunrise, and appear different under each condition.
The inner two sculptures are more classical and representational, standing tall and erect, even without discernible heads, hands, arms, legs. They are made of stainless steel with a polycarbonate, acrylic and polyurethane surface treatment. One, which is very dark, looks like a cross between Darth Vader and “The Winged Victory of Samothrace” in the Louvre, with her unfurling wings. The other has a surface that looks like acid washed jeans (not necessarily a bad thing). Both recall medieval armor, as well as the cyborgs in Lee’s earlier sculpture — and an artwork inside the Met: Umberto Boccioni’s futurist “Unique Forms of Continuity in Space” (1913), a landmark of European modern art that attempted to capture a human figure moving swiftly through space in the age of automobiles and airplanes.
