Lee Bul Untitled

Produced for the NGV in 2004, Untitled is being shown at the Gallery for the first time in over a decade.

Lee Bul is a Korean artist and leading figure in the contemporary art world. Since the late 1980s, Bul’s installations and sculptures have drawn from the visual languages of science fiction, anime and manga to explore the social constructions of the human body. Bul creates monsters and cyborgs that deconstruct binaries across gender, nature and artifice. These hybrid creatures occupy a strange, but awe-inspiring alternative reality as they extend and re-configure human and animal forms to produce new, unsettling beings.

The work, which is the most complex of Bul’s monsters, comprises a central body from which other parts of the form explode outwards into space. Suspended, these parts create an uncanny form that beckons its audience into a techno-fantastical future where new, uncategorisable species transcend the present reality.