Lee Bul: The Monster Show
Centre for Contemporary Arts until September 28

I remember walking, three years ago, into a dimly lit room in London’s Barbican Centre, to find myself standing in fear and awe at the feet of Darth Vader, the sound of his mechanically-aided breathing filling the room like poison gas. I also remember, farther back in years, the well-rehearsed feelings of wonder and humility as I knelt before the crucified figure of Christ, hung high above the altar. The two memories converged this week when I reached the entrance of Lee Bul’s Monster Show at the CCA, and spotted the single figure of a mutant cyborg suspended silently from the ceiling, white silicone against white walls, deep shadows on the floor.

Lee Bul, who represented South Korea at the Venice Biennale in 1997, confronts complex issues of gender, power and new technology through the cyberpunk eyes of the manga reader. In these Japanese comic books, girl-robots are assembled, broken and re-assembled, sometimes from human parts like Sayoko, who allows her brain to be used in a fighting robot. These cyborgs have the unfeasible figure of Angelina Joli and the superhuman power of the Terminator, but they are half-people, incomplete and prey to their male creators.

There are 12 cyborgs in the show; between them they have no heads, nine legs, and eight arms, but all of them have ample busoms and a sense of sexy dynamism. The feminist overtones of this limbless, headless state are clear, and the point is made most poignantly in the case of Cyborg Red and Cyborg Blue, two life-size silicone figures, luminous like waxy soap, bolted to steel pillars on wooden pallets, and illuminated by rattling studio lights as if ready for the operation. The figures are glorious but they are trapped within the limitations of man’s imagination – capable only of living his dream.

In another room three smaller cyborgs, identical in form but with differently coloured beaded surfaces, sit on illuminated plinths like oriental artefacts at the Burrell. The beading gives the contemporary figures an air of decorative antiquity, bringing to the fore a quietly creeping truth, that every exhibit is somehow a museum piece; a remnant of our ruined future.

Five large Monster Drawings demonstrate Lee Bul’s fluid drawing skills, as she outlines in intricate detail the flamboyant tentacles, either biological or botanical or both, of her elaborate organic fantasies. These drawings are the only clue that The Monster Show doesn’t actually have any monsters in it: the exhibition has been shown already in Dijon and Marseilles, where huge nightmarish creatures, like crosses between giant insects and sprouting potatoes, co-existed with the rivetted symmetry of the cyborgs.

Lee Bul’s first ever UK solo show is, in effect, missing half of its limbs. While this scales down the scope of the exhibition, it also focusses attention on a strong body of work which succeeds in looking sumptuous while asking strong questions about where we’re going with new technology. Just as Mary Shelley warned against unthinking experimentation on half-human monsters two centuries ago, so now does Lee Bul, but this time the future is almost here.

Catrìona Black, Sunday Herald 31.08.03