“I have many mothers,” the South Korean artist Lee Bul said as she stood in the Louise Bourgeois painting exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum in 2022. The curator Lesley Ma, who was there with her, related this anecdote to a packed auditorium on a recent evening when Lee’s four sculptures, titled “Long Tail Halo,” opened to the public. They are the fifth edition of a commission for a contemporary artist to fill the niches on the Met’s facade.
We all have many mothers and fathers and others who’ve guided us in the paths we’ve chosen in life. This is the perfect statement for Lee, who for four decades has, like Bourgeois, pushed the boundaries of the human body in art.
After graduating from art school in Seoul in 1987, Lee made “Cyborg” sculptures that fantastically reconfigured the human body, and gave guerrilla performances on the streets. Some of these protested a repressive regime in South Korea but also the country’s abortion policy. For the New Museum in New York in 2002, she offered wild karaoke “pods” that challenged the viewer to participate. “I felt like I could change the world,” she recently told my colleague Andrew Russeth, in a New York Times profile.
Lee’s subversive, questioning approach has incorporated materials as varied as fabric, metal, silicone, porcelain and dead fish, whose stench was so bad the Museum of Modern Art removed the installation — raising questions of cultural bias and anti-Asian sentiment.
So how did a radical artist like Lee approach the commission at the Met, whose neo-Classical niches were left empty for 100 years after the facade was completed? In many ways, the overall presentation is a little underwhelming. This is largely due to the absence of color. In ancient Greece, facades like the one the Met copies had brightly painted sculpture to adorn them.
