This Monstrosity, This Proliferation, Once Upon a Time Called Woman, Butterfly, Asian Girl
Yvonne Volkart on Lee Bul

Lee Bul’s entire oeuvre, from around the mid 1980s until now, is a radical staging of female figuration, global cultural and historical phantasms and fantasies of femininity. In recent years, her work has centred on the ostensibly close relationship between women and technology that is simultaneously threatening and seductive, controllable and proliferating, human and monstrous. This very real situation is symptomatic of a broad cultural and social transformation.

What makes Lee Bul’s work so intriguing is her starting point that, although we seem to have reached a new level in technological development, we are still captivated by fantasies that are closely connected to their historical precedents. She then exaggerates and transforms these historical fantasies through her own perspective as a female art producer from Korea. With respect to content and phenomenology one could say that Lee Bul’s work functions as the aesthetic subtext to the highly gendered unconscious of new media and new technologies. It seems as if she wants to make a translation of something as yet unwritten and unsaid, as if her projects are the latent visual reinterpretation of old and superficially changing fantasies. It incorporates the traces and effects which new media and technologies have on (female) identity and subjectivity.

In 1997 Lee Bul began with the production of cyborgs – sculptures made of silicone showing fragmented female bodies with smooth, closed surfaces. This series refers visually to avantgarde western male fantasies of machine women and the femininity of machines as well as to the contemporaneous Japanese manga and Korean animes and the prevalence of young female cyborgs as sexy protagonists. Lee Bul makes it evident that, although there is a cultural, historical, geographical and high and low gap between the two genres, they are nevertheless very similar regarding the sexualisation and feminisation of technology and the mechanisation of women.
Discussing Fritz Lang’s film Metropolis – in which the corrupt scientist Rotwang invented a destructive, machine-like alter ego of the pleasant, brave woman, Maria – the American theorist Andreas Huyssen has shown that man’s fear of the machine has turned into man’s fear of the (castrating) woman. In other words, the socio-political issue of capitalist use of technologies may be translated into the familiar narrative of the war of the sexes, or rather of the phallic woman threatening men, armed with a castrating vagina dentata. By giving birth to a machine woman, a puppet girl, man hopes to master the uncontrollable nature of femininity and the violence of technology.

In her work, Lee Bul has consistently referred to these ambivalent avantgarde fantasies of the ‘woman as machine’ and ‘the machine as vamp’. She has reconstructed images dealing with the fear of the castrating woman, of the fertile and threatening woman, the construction of the nice, innocent Asian woman, the woman as girlish puppet, flower, butterfly, insect, fish, the woman as a damaged victim and growing techno monster. Lee mimics and exaggerates the fantasy of the dissected female body, lost and apparent only in shadows, wires, knots, and ornaments intertwined. In her projects you rarely find the complete female body – it is dissolved in allegories, to be conveyed as feelings, intensities and qualities, leaving no scope for fixations and projections. However, unlike her avantgarde precursors, especially in the new works, she shows these partial bodies as paradoxically alive, even fertile and auto-erotic. These bodies or body-like entities no longer merely signify or supplement a male subject in crisis, they seem to live and grow, generating a certain kind of pleasure, hanging and fragmented as they are.

In her new sculptural series of works like Amaryllis, Chrysalis, Siren and Supernova, a three-dimensional realisation of the earlier Monster Drawings, Lee refers on one side to Hans Bellmer’s anagrammatic drawings and puppets of raped and damaged young girls, on the other to a kind of a mute and hybrid monster between animal, plant, mother and machine, a kind of cyborg too. But unlike the earlier cyborgs of which the surface was very homogenous and closed, these cyborgs now seems open, pervadable and even proliferating. The represented or, rather, associated femininity here is more intricate and muddled. It is no longer so clear what the basis for figuration is – polyp, octopus, flower, snake, tangle of intertwined cords, hair or a low-tech arrangement of machine and computer intestines. Although there is not a specific gender represented, it seems to be female. This association of a female monster is not only suggested with respect to Lee's former work or by titles like "Siren" etc., but also by its appearance of a hysteric getting out of control. With this curly hair, this kind of breasts or eyes, and with this kind of an ecstatic maternal body proliferating without boundaries it is as if woman’s ability to give birth had turned inside out, had become something visible and corporeal.
Although it is so much about the impact of new technology, Lee Bul’s work is, nevertheless, always related to ‘old’ media. It seems as if she consciously distances herself from current new media hype, demonstrating that you do not always have to be in the middle of technological enthusiasm to reflect its history and outcomes. Lee Bul exposes the extent of fantasy femininity around the so-called new technologies and its possibilities. Her work is a radical attempt to reassert that everyone has to participate and engage in the process of narrating techno stories with whatever means available in order to repossess these fantasies.


1. Lee Bul in correspondence with the author.
2. See ‘Infobiobodies: Art and Aesthetic Strategies in the New World Order’ in Old Boys Network (ed.), Next Cyberfeminism International (Berlin, 1999).
For further information about Lee Bul see www.leebul.com
Yvonne Volkart is currently writing a PhD about fantasies of fluidity and unruliness in new media art.