Growing up as the daughter of left-wing activists during South Korea’s military dictatorship, Lee Bul experienced the effects of a repressive regime in a country undergoing rapid economic and cultural transformation. Her earliest works, dating from the late 1980s, were street performances for which she made and wore monstrous ‘soft sculpture’ costumes festooned with protrusions and dangling viscera. These were followed by her Cyborg sculptures in which eroticised female bodies morphed into machines, forming incomplete hybrids lacking heads and limbs. They in turn led her to explore ideas of futuristic cityscapes inspired by the dreams, ideals and utopias conceived in Japanese manga and anime, bioengineering and the visionary architecture of Bruno Taut (1880-1938).
