In This Cryptic Interview, Lee Bul Illuminates Her ‘Grand Narrative’ and Speaks to Humanity’s Future

<img decoding="async" class="size-full-width wp-image-1582645" src="https://observer.com/wp-content/uploads/websites/2/2025/09/11.-Keen-To-Be-VulnerablepercentC3percentA2percentC2percent80percentC2percent93Metalized-Balloon-2015-2016-2020.jpg?high quality=80&w=970" alt="A big silver airship-like sculpture suspended above a staircase in a museum atrium." width="970" top="645" data-caption='“Lee Bul: From 1998 to Now” is at Leeum Museum, Seoul, by means of January 4, 2026. <span class=”media-credit”>Picture: Jeon Byung-cheol. Courtesy of Leeum Museum of Artwork</span>’>

From her earliest beginnings within the late Nineteen Eighties, when she rose to prominence with body-based performances geared toward scandalizing South Korea’s patriarchal respectability, Lee Bul established herself as one of many nation’s most provocative modern artists—not just for pushing the boundaries between mediums but in addition for her unfiltered inventive experiments, which doubled as political gestures in opposition to the contradictions of Korea’s conservative society and of our time. From these early performances exposing the feminine situation in a post-dictatorship, male-dominated South Korea, she moved within the Nineteen Nineties towards futuristic smooth sculptures and cyborg types, merging eroticism, expertise and dystopian critique. The result’s a pioneering, visionary and sometimes cryptic multimedia lexicon that appears to belong to a future dimension, already estranged from the tragedies and problems with our current.

Whereas the artist hardly ever accepts interviews, Observer secured one on the event of her milestone profession survey, “Lee Bul: from 1998 to Now,” which not too long ago opened at Leeum Museum alongside Frieze Seoul and runs by means of January 4, 2026. When the solutions arrived, I used to be hardly shocked by the cryptic language she used—nearer to divinatory epigrams from a future cyborg model of herself than to standard responses—but they had been profoundly illuminating, echoing the truths already woven into the exhibition. Her response to our questions confirmed I used to be, at the least, on the appropriate path: “Please let the author know that she is such an insightful viewer that my response could also be pointless,” she wrote. “The questions replicate my intentions, so I’m assured she’s going to perceive my perspective. If my responses are used for a evaluate, these key phrases alone ought to sufficiently convey my ideas.”

Once I visited her studio a number of years in the past through the first version of Frieze Seoul, it was evident that Bul was not one for a lot of phrases. Like most visionaries, she follows pictures and intuitions that demand translation into types already forward of, or past, the attain of codification and language. Her studio is much less a office than a laboratory of matter in movement—a maze of maquettes, drawings and research, the place fragments of concepts discover new reassemblies and mutations in a probably infinite means of interrogation, signification and visualization.

Contemporary off her Met Facade Fee in New York, Bul’s exhibition on the Leeum Museum presents an expansive journey by means of the various phases of her futuristic “Grand Narrative.” Co-curated with M+, it’s the most complete survey of her profession up to now, spanning greater than 4 many years from the Nineteen Eighties to the current. But the present is conceived much less as a chronological overview than as a spectacular set up, a Gesamtkunstwerk that choreographs disparate works into an area that resists logical sequence.

Notably, no captions information the customer towards a coherent path. The absence of a script looks like the one devoted strategy to strategy Bul’s follow, which is essentially a relentless act of “world-building”—by no means arriving at a remaining product or answer however as an alternative crafting an ever-evolving universe that mirrors unstoppable technological innovation; interrogates shifting relationships between humanity, nature and machine; and speculates on dystopian horizons alongside the opportunity of various futures. Bul opted for a nonlinear, multilayered construction for the present, which she known as “Through Negativa.” The construction of this survey resists mounted hierarchies of middle and periphery, leading to a “Mannerist labyrinth,” or a path of paradoxes and new prospects of interpretation that deliberately blurs all boundaries between starting and finish.

On the primary flooring, Bul performs with reflections and various dimensions in her immersive set up Civitas Solis II. The mirror-covered flooring fragments actuality and the physique, making a disrupted notion of house and time—a mesmerizing sensorial and narrative confusion that, paradoxically, opens up new prospects and reframes the complete meaning-making course of. The work was impressed by Civitas Solis, a Seventeenth-century treatise through which Italian theologian and thinker Tommaso Campanella envisioned a “radiant utopia.” Right here, that shimmering promise of a really perfect society is revealed additionally as a potential lure, an alluring phantasm that may open the way in which to absolute management.

“This primary chapter is concerning the ‘Reconsideration of (actuality) notion,’” Bul responded when requested what she needed to attain and what sort of response she hoped to set off within the viewer. The mirrors scattered throughout the ground catch, challenge and warp the sunshine of greater than 260 LED bulbs, manifesting each the seductive promise and the latent risk implied in a number of potential paths of selection. The house opens extra questions than solutions, but additionally gives the opportunity of considering various notions of actuality—past the historically linear classifications of time and house which have lengthy guided, and sometimes misguided, our mannequin of civilization.

Within the exhibition’s decrease degree, Bul immerses guests in her research and constructions—the important core of her follow—the place the emphasis lies much more on course of than on outcomes. With maquettes suspended in nearly architectural preparations, the exhibition turns into a dwelling extension of her studio, which she described as a “procession of follow to replicate on a topic.” As soon as once more, Bul privileges inquiry over decision, formulating hypotheses somewhat than remaining truths concerning the nature of any given “topic.” Her unrelenting thoughts, in fixed dialogue with shifting circumstances and phenomena, forces us to rethink every part from alternate views.

Works like Infinite Starburst of Your Chilly Darkish Eyes, an uncanny assemblage the place city detritus equivalent to stainless-steel, mirrors, wooden and aluminum—fragments of latest city structure—collide and entangle right into a fragile new physique, expose the mechanical failures and catastrophic disasters implied in a single-direction thought of collective progress, and reveal how the human aspect of our existence most frequently turns into its sufferer.

General, the present reveals extra about her strategy to artwork than any conventional survey might, although a few of her most seminal works aren’t essentially right here. Bul typically operates as very similar to a researcher or engineer as an artist, creating and testing hypotheses for various human constructions and new relationships with the encompassing surroundings. “The primary fiction of artwork is (C)reation,” she responded when requested the most important existential query for all artists and creators: what’s the remaining fiction of artwork, notably its function in immediately’s society.