Cybernated Aesthetics: Lee Bul and the Body Transfigured

The sculptural work of Lee Bul generates a compelling visual incongruity within a cluster of aesthetic divergences. In her 1998 exhibition at Artsonje Center in Seoul, Korea, the suspended, white, and partially constructed representations of cyborg bodies, though unbounded by traditional biological gender, appear as female due to their hourglass shapes. But between them stands a monster. Monster: Black (1998), the many-tentacled amorphism, the great glittering pile of excrement. Visually incommensurable, the clean, sleek, resolutely contained surfaces of the female cyborgs resonate tensely against the unwieldy, seven-foot tidal wave of abjection that has gathered up its full force and threatens to crash down, subsuming all in its environment.

Much more subtle—but perhaps most relevant for this discussion—are Lee's Monster Drawings of 1998 in which proliferating forms mimic the octopus, the insect, the chrysalis, nerve endings, plant growth, and organs in a confusion of internal and external parts. The diagrammatic outlines of these India ink drawings add to the ambivalence of the forms, since the contours and the descriptive lines do not necessarily resolve themselves into discrete entities. The three-dimensional versions of these 2-D renderings, though compelling, do not hover between cohesion and dispersal in the same way. They float within the space of the viewer as distinct objects, as though clinically suspended in liquid. Lee's fleshy monsters, on the other hand, endanger the very sanctity of discrete entities by suggesting in a visceral way that their edges might bleed into ours. That is to say, these piles built up in the space, suggesting ordure and entrails, and threaten the idea of the autonomous subject.

Born 1964 in Yongwol, South Korea, Lee is widely known in the contemporary artworld and is recognized by many as the leading contemporary Korean artist of her generation. She has participated in the Istanbul Biennial, the Venice Biennale (for which she was one of two Korean representatives), as well as numerous exhibitions in venues such as the Walker Art Center, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Spain's Domus Artum 02, and the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Japan. The artist mounted solo exhibitions in Salamanca, Spain, as well as in Seoul, Korea, and among many other accolades was short-listed for the Hugo Boss Prize in 1998 as well as selected to exhibit at Fondation Cartier in November 2007. Her work was recently included in Global Feminisms at the Brooklyn Museum.

It is broadly acknowledged by critics that Lee's production since 1998 bears much in common with Donna Haraway's "political fictions"—namely cyborgs, monsters, and hybrids—as strategies for stepping out of restrictive binaries that order much of Western intellectual thought.1 According to Haraway, the construction of the cyborg, being post-gender, operates beyond both the sex binary and the social realities that accompany it. This positions the cyborg as a possible metaphor for standing outside of phallocentric, rational thought. Lee's work, as both a staging ground for ideas and as aesthetic expression, forms a bridge for the consideration of representations of postmodern dissipated structures and liminal entities. The cyborg and its many manifestations in cultural expression demonstrate models of identity that do not adhere to static nation-state, gender, race, or class. Monsters and hybrids, too, speak to those unauthorized aberrations and unlikely cross-pollinations that straddle clear categories, especially within rigid systems of definition.

The trope of the cyborg has been mobilized successfully within the context of technology as a political metaphor for outstripping the binary limits of the human/machine dualism. As a part of a discussion into the broadened possibilities for technology as shaping contemporary thought, metaphorical constructions like the cyborg comprise useful models through which the complex struggle with advanced technology finds some of its most potent articulations.

In order to develop an aesthetics that accounts for the impact of electronics and the digital, a "cybernated aesthetics" so to speak, it is necessary to look outside of traditional modes of analysis such as art history to consider other models for relationships to technology. By "cybernated aesthetics" I invoke artist Nam June Paik's term...