This research project studies the work of Korean contemporary artist Lee Bul, who harnesses disgust and absurdity to examine the place of the gendered body amidst patriarchal political and social culture. In our cultural canon, monsters and cyborgs incite fear and fascination and are categorized as distinctly ‘other.’ By examining the othering of such ‘unnatural’ entities, Lee draws our attention to the othering, objectification, mechanization, and monsterization of the body. Lee’s mounds of cotton-stuffed flesh and dismembered, slick cyborgian forms reveal the precarity of the dichotomies between beauty and disgust, human and creature, inside and outside, self and other, natural and artificial. In materializing these contradictions embedded within our cultural truths, Lee challenges the power structures that dictate boundaries and distinctions onto the body. 

Further, Lee grapples with the notion of the body turned inside out to uncover the complex interiorities of both the physical body and the space it occupies in society. The emergence of Lee’s artistic career coincides with South Korea’s tumultuous transition from authoritarian regime to democracy, and within this political landscape, her deconstruction of traditional distinctions such as gender might function as a disguised mode of dissidence. 

The focus of this project is to examine how Lee Bul’s work can provide a lens with which to understand the ways cultural and political realities have turned the female body monstrous. Engaging with her early sculpture and performance work, roughly from the years 1989-2000, can reveal how against the complex political backdrop of Korea at the contemporary moment, Lee’s manifestations of monstrosity and disgust interrupt normativity and conformity in a nuanced, parodic, absurd cultural critique.