[FRIEZE 2025] Garden of broken utopias: Lee Bul at Leeum Museum of Art

What happens when the body once used to protest grows into a vessel for something greater? When Lee Bul first stormed onto Korea's art scene in the late 1980s, she did so with bodily defiance — a force that shocked, unsettled and jolted other bodies awake. In 1989, she dangled nude from the rafters of a Seoul theater, with ropes biting into her skin as she spoke of her own abortion, then still a criminal act in the country. The following year, she roamed the streets of Korea and Japan in a grotesque costume of flesh and tentacles. For 12 days, passersby gawked and recoiled at her unruly presence. Her answer to their stares came in the performance’s wry title: “Sorry for Suffering — You think I’m a puppy on a picnic?” By 1997, her provocations reached New York’s Museum of Modern Art, where she unveiled the infamous “Majestic Splendor,” rows of dead fish sealed in plastic bags, their scales bedazzled with cheap sequins. The work embodied a visceral tension between glittering ideals of feminine beauty and decaying bodies. But its odor grew so noxious that it forced the muWeiter zum vollständigen Artikel bei Korea Times Weiter zum vollständigen Artikel bei Korea Times