Lee Bul B. 1964

Executed in 2006.

PKM Gallery, Seoul.
Acquired directly from the above by the current owner.

Exh.Cat., Lee Bul, On Every New Shadow, Fondation Cartier pour l'art contemporain, 16 November 2007 - 27 January 2008, pp.1, 2-3, 54 (from the same series).   

Generally in excellent condition.
In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective qualified opinion.
NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING CONDITION OF A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD "AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF SALE PRINTED IN THE CATALOGUE.

Since the 1990s Lee Bul has become increasingly important on the international scene as the most original Korean artist of her generation. Over the past two decades she has achieved international recognition for her multivaried production, which includes drawing, painting, sculpture, performance, installation, and video. Her work draws upon sources ranging from critical theory to the dream worlds of speculative fiction and film.

Born in 1964, Lee Bul moved to Seoul during a period of turbulent political and social transformation. Iconoclastic from the very beginning, she made a radical break with her academic training in sculpture at Seoul's Hongik University to produce performance work incorporating wearable, soft-sculptural forms that contravened idealized conception of beauty. During this period she became prominent in the underground art circuit as a leader and founding member of Museum, a loose collective of idiosyncratic artists, performers and musicians whose brief period of activity continues to resonate not only in the experimental arts but also in aspects of popular culture in Korea today.

Throughout the mid-1990s, Lee Bul continued to create provocative works that crossed genres and disciplines, exploring themes of beauty, corruption, and decay. Showing in Japan, Canada, Australia and Europe, she began to be recognized as one of the most daring figures emerging on the international art arena.

The artist's work has been featured in solo exhibitions throughout the world, including at the Cartier Foundation, Paris (2007); Domus Artium, Salamanca, Spain (2007); Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney (2004); Japan Foundation, Tokyo (2003); The Power Plant, Toronto (2003); MAC, Musée d'Art Contemporain, Marseille (2002); and the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York (2002). She was a finalist for the 1998 Hugo Boss Prize, and in 1999 she was awarded a prize at the Venice Biennale for her contribution to both the Korean Pavilion and the international exhibition in the Arsenale curated by Harald Szeemann.

The work on offer is the first major work by the artist to ever come to market. A delicate affair of crystal beads and aluminium wire, the piece Autopoiesis (2006) (Lot 26) hangs midair, resembling a tentacled underwater creature.

Much of the artist's sculptural work makes significant references to modern and contemporary architecture – especially the glass palaces and towns in the midst of clouds by the Utopian visionary architect Bruno Taut – yet at the same time is also affected by a variety of other influences: "... it's not about presenting a single, fixed story. It can start anywhere at any point, and there is no beginning or end, only the cyclical, internal permutation of fragments. The most salient allegorical elements are architectural because utopian aspirations often surface in architectural forms. But I've mixed in other fragments as well; some are fictions, others, private memories and imaginings. And I've tried to avoid imposing a temporal structure as an ordering device on these elements. They must in some sense become loosed from historical time and collide with each other."[1]

It is perhaps this explanation which best deciphers the inspiration behind the current work. The term autopoiesis was originally conceived as an attempt to characterize the nature of living systems. It is the process whereby an organization produces itself; literally, self-production - not to be confused with allopoiesis, which is the process whereby an organization produces something other than itself. An example of the former is a biological cell or a living organism; the latter is exemplified by an assembly line.

The term was originally introduced by Chilean biologists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela in 1973:

    "An autopoietic machine is a machine organized (defined as a unity) as a network of processes of production (transformation and destruction) of components which: (i) through their interactions and transformations continuously regenerate and realize the network of processes (relations) that produced them; and (ii) constitute it (the machine) as a concrete unity in space in which they (the components) exist by specifying the topological domain of its realization as such a network." [2]

Through using such fragile components as crystal and glass beads in the structure of Autopoiesis (2006), Lee Bul's work simulates the complex interwoven structure of an organization or society – themselves networks of myriad individual delicate entities and tenuous conditions: each reliant on the others for their very existence... or extinction. 

[1] Exh. Cat., Lee Bul, On Every New Shadow, Fondation Cartier pour l'art contemporain, Paris, 16 November 2007 – 27 January 2008, p21.

[2] Maturana, Varela, 1980, p. 78.