Contemporary Asian Artist －Ⅰ　
Lee Bul
Monster + Cyborg

The “Contemporary Asian Artist” exhibition series succeeds the 10 exhibitions of “Asian Artists Today” held in the Fukuoka Art Museum from 1987. It aims at introducing young and middle standing artists who cannot be introduced in the Fukuoka Triennale despite their outstanding talents. The first in this new series of exhibition introduces the work of Lee Bul (b. 1964), a Korean artist.

In Korea, artists of a new generation of artists started to emerge in the late 1980s. They made works based on contemporary urban mass culture, completely different from the Stoic abstraction or the political art of the previous generations. Lee Bul appeared in this context with street performances and provocative sculptural pieces that self-consciously emphasized artifice, kitsch and decoration. She first gained widespread attention through sensational works dealing openly with issues of the body, particularly the feminine body. Her artistic production developed dynamically, encompassing installations featuring fresh fish decorated with brilliant sequins, huge inflatable “monuments” inviting audience participation, sculptures of feminine cyborgs, and video installations dealing with elements of contemporary Asian popular culture, such as Karaoke. She is now one of the most prominent Asian artists on the international art scene, receiving high recognition in Europe and America, and a prize at the Venice Biennale in 1999.

In this exhibition, she is presenting examples from her latest body of work, including drawings, sections of cyborg bodies made of porcelain, and large-scale sculptures that combine biomorphic and mechanical visual elements evoking images of monsters from animations.