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The Arts Intel Report

A Cultural Compass
For the World Traveler
A Cultural Compass
For the World Traveler

Lee Bul: Beginning

Dec 15, 2020 – Mar 7, 2021
43 Insa-dong, Jongno-gu, Seoul, South Korea

South Korean artist Lee Bul, the daughter of political dissidents, grew up amid dust. She recalls her early childhood in a military town as shrouded in grey. It was the modernization era of dictator Park Chung-Hee, when even trees were razed to the ground. Her parents were often imprisoned. Such harsh formative memories no doubt play a role in Lee’s monstrous sculptures, cyborgs, and dystopian landscapes. In the mid 1980s, during Korea’s years of globalization, she began exploring the subjects of ideology and brutality while an art student at Seoul’s Hongik University. This exhibition, the first since her retrospective at the Hayward Gallery, presents work from the years 1987 to 1997, the decade in which Lee went from student artist to renown. —E.C.