Lee Bul, a leading Korean artist, currently has an exhibition of sculptural works at the Lehmann Maupin gallery, along with related studies and drawings, comprising a wide range of materials, visual elements and references.

Anchoring the exhibition is a large, grotto-like sculpture entitled Bunker – M. Bakhtin. The work invites visitors to experience what the artist describes as a “sonic simulacrum” of architectural spaces and landscapes situated within a mirrored environment. Wall pieces and a gridded platform on the gallery floor make use of two-way mirrors to create further disorientations.

In her intellectually provocative and formally sensuous work, Lee Bul plays on the engagement with, and sometimes confrontation between, traditional aesthetics and modern aspirations, with unorthodox results.

psychoPEDIA asked I.E. Statement to review Lee Bul's show. They do share an appreciation of unorthodox presentations.

Lee Bul and her 26th Street Lehmann Maupin gallery art/crotch review via misdirected heated creative sensibility found its own self-acknowledgement within framing thighs. Not all creative stuff succeeds that well.

And they, the potentially wet populace, did come by, to a degree, where scant as in “scantly dressed” loses its own lettering, but they did inadvertently find reconstituted images that glue one and all thanks to a series of omnipresent variations on a theme of floor mirrors: a welcome mat, extensively extended as in one room’s decree for unlimited crotch revealing. This action is facilitated by having the floor, a mass of chromium shine cut to squares, replicated plastic bouncing constructions that belittle our capacity but to look down. Where is the art when panties tease was the refrain. However, this particular area of the show is a serious space, for the artist furnishes her visitors a Bunker, one structured by a dogmatic construction that further holds the thematic despair Lee Bul contemplates, whether it be political or the general lack of creative initiative to “reinvent the world”--her phrase.

The historical references of horror and world plights given presence in metallic cabinet enclosures that yell metaphorical threats within a stainless steel glare solely make us all just more discreet voyeurs. These housed constructions greet the gallery goers, but in conjunction with their no nonsense references, be they clear or not, the visitor’s ingenuity is appraised upon entering the gallery, for the artist provides a gridded platform whose two way mirrors mirror crotch winks once the entrants prance their respective wares, and they do. Bul assists us to move away from life’s hard edges.

Bul’s hard verbiage: “Her soft lips touched mine and {everything} became hard” or as Bul wrote it: “Her soft lips touched mine and every thing became hard.” Life’s broken landmine or land mine. Despair: not even a word can be rendered whole. Her wall word placement consolidates her intent: the structures with ornate glitter, beads a dangle, metallic sharpened disarray or the obscured counterpart, a Bunker’s black edgy gray fore bearings: chastity belts’—all that scary, barely defined, lock and key stuff—mirrored restraints pale within life’s procreative possibilities. Lee Bul is a philosopher.



See Lee Bul's exhibition from May 8th to June 14th at Lehmann Maupin gallery.
540 W 23rd St, (212) 255.2923

Photos courtesy of Lehmann Maupin