The Genesis Facade Commission: Lee Bul, Long Tail Halo

Lee Bul Installation view Long Tail Halo CTCS #2, 2024
 

By JONATHAN GOODMAN January 6, 2025 

The Genesis Facade commission, under the aegis of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, has asked noted sculptural artist Lee Bul to provide three -dimensional works for the four arched spaces on the facade of the museum. The results are spectacular; the four works, each different, fill the spaces marvelously well. Lee Bul, now sixty years old, spent a period of time In America, but she returned to Seoul to advance a career that has made her a major figure in Asia. This project returns her to New York City; it is the first undertaking in more than twenty years in America by the highly gifted sculptor.

Lee Bul had, at one point, taken an interest in future form: cyborgs on the march. The four works, situated on the facade, with two sculptures on each side of the museum’s main entrance, feel mostly figurative. But abstract elements are included. Moreover, the pieces are hard to see, as they are installed on the building’s second floor or level (as defined by an external molding) above the steps into the lobby. 

This means we are at a distance from the art, and, short of a binoculars, details are missed. The sculptures are not of a single piece; instead they are made of parts, scrupulously arranged to construct a figurative entirety–even if the individual elements constructing the whole are abstract in that they cannot be recognized partially as representative. Three of the four works are light colored; one is dark in hue. Photographs help see the installations better, but they are artificial experiences; the best we can do as audience members is to crane our necks in out attempt to look at Lee Bul’s gestalts 

Lee Bul’s strength as an artist depends on her ability to find different ways of placing the body and, also and especially, setting up the body’s construction using differences that make the sculpture idiosyncratic and a bit independent from historical reference and from each other. Lee Bul’s originality is such that it leads to a meditation on how work can be closely or distantly figurative at the same time. This is a very useful way of contemporizing the artist’s esthetic–even if it is not fully new in a historical sense.

The niche existing on the far left of the facade is taken up with a figure that is partially reclining: the figure’s lower body rests on the bottom of the opening, with its legs extending into open space. As a figure of relative insouciance and informality, it contrasts sharply with the neoclassical front of The Met. The other figures, which stand within their spaces, are also pieced together in ways  that allow us to see the gestalt in its entirety but also indicate how the works consist of parts.This is possible to view from one’s position below the works, but it is not entirely easy to do so. 

I think that, for Lee Bul, the challenge of filling the arched spaces was as pressing as the construction of the figures themselves. How does someone able to easily perceive the whole figures if the audience’s line of sight is at an angle upward–high enough to preclude the works’ full envisioning? This may be a technical problem only, but does it make sense to suggest a cultural/political divide, in which high differences stand for moral probity. Indeed, poetry tends too take over the situation, even if the works are quite literally enmeshed in the past. 

Certainly the sharp difference between 19th century neoclassicism, responsible for the formalism of The Met’s facade, and the cubist-inspired references of Lee Bul’s art make for a possible (probable?) conflict. To our near astonishment, Lee Bul  has managed to keep her figures’ independence–despite the fact that the two esthetics and cultures exist at a great distance–as addressed in the project. Perhaps one way of understanding the gap is to see how, at this point in time, such marked extrapolations are taken for granted.

And likely the best thing we could say is that Lee Bul’s work is capable of standing up to influences from anywhere. Her work is independent, her own. The artist, whose reputation has been slightly rebellious, has found a new way combining the old with new, and sculpture with architecture. This allows her to maintain a creativity that does, in singular fashion, join the past. Simply making figurative art today is considered retrograde by more than a few. And even the great movement of cubism is more than a century old, making it a historical movement and not a current one. Even so, it is wise to take notice of a skilled formal re- envisioning  of cubism, as Lee Bul’s work enables us to see. 

In the long run, Lee Bul won’t make her reputation by bridging the old and the new; such gaps have been accepted as creative for decades. Lee Bul’s cubist sculptures offer avenues into two kinds of past: the earlier one of classical formalism and the more recent one of the innovations that took place early in the previous century. Her figures thus both reflect and confront schools of thinking that we today we may well disregard, But Lee Bul doesn’t do that; instead, she relies on movements outside her own culture to point out the historical reductivism of our own. 

At the same time, there is an important influence we have not yet spoken of: the influence of Korean culture, which is utterly different from our own. We cannot read each other’s books; we cannot understand each other phrasing. We are, necessarily, now internationalists in art; Lee Bul is no exception. But her intelligence is remarkable for its adherence to her own manner of thinking–even though the project occurs in a different country, within a tradition that has not been openly influential on her (a classical culture like Korea’s dies hard). As a result, we have the best of both worlds: a Korean artist making the best of her imagination,  despite or because of the visual differences to which she has been introduced–and likely transformed. WM