A Strategy in-between Universality and Specificity: Speaking through Korean Woman Artist Lee Bul in the Globalized Art World

I. Introduction

In the globalized art world—essentially dominated by male artists from the United States and Western Europe—a non-Western woman artist’s works must resonate with this art scene for the artist’s voice to be heard. At the same time, the artist inevitably challenges the male-centric Western art world with an unfamiliar voice. How can this ambiguous coexistence of partial identification and partial differentiation be understood? This paper examines how the Korean woman artist Lee Bul (b. 1964) has faced this dilemma. Since the 1990s, Lee Bul has been actively engaged in the international art scene while residing in Korea.

Before a conversation with Hiroki Azuma (あずま ひろき, b. 1971) at Art Sonje Center in 2016, Lee Bul presented a brief performance. The artist prefaced it by stating that the reading would consist of excerpts from writings about the artist’s work.

I-ya, O-i, I-ya, O-u-o, A, A-e, A-i-i-i...

After reading vowels aloud, the artist proceeded to consonants:

M-s-r-z-ts-m-r-s-s-d-z-g-p-m-n-g, g-g...

As described by Lee Bul, the artist enjoys “running away with all her might” before being caught.¹ Art historians and critics often become preoccupied with using analytical frameworks and discourses to explain continuity and change throughout an artist’s body of work. However, for an artist like Lee Bul, who resists being trapped by linguistic dominance, interpretive frameworks can serve to confine rather than illuminate the work. The performance of breaking down and re-articulating text to diminish its predetermined meanings seems to stem from this struggle. But was this attempt meaningful? Why does Lee Bul employ a humorous yet somewhat bitter tone? How do interpretive languages seek to capture art? How is the visual language of a work articulated, and what effects does it produce?

This paper applies Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s (b. 1942) famous question, “Can the subaltern speak?” to the globalized art world. Spivak argues that Western intellectuals claim their discourse represents subaltern voices, yet paradoxically, these voices are filtered and silenced through dominant discursive structures. Consequently, Spivak concludes that “the subaltern cannot speak.” ² Is it truly impossible for the subaltern to speak? Are the structures of dominant discourse so homogeneous and rigid? This paper extends these inquiries using concepts introduced by feminist science theorist Donna Haraway (b. 1944) in “Situated Knowledges” (1988): situated knowledges, partial perspectives, and feminist objectivity.³ Feminist objectivity, unlike disembodied, transcendent, and universal objectivity, is produced through situated knowledges composed of perspectives shared only partially by multiple positioned subjects. These knowledges are provisional truths continuously negotiated and re-examined by partial perspectives. Therefore, the foundation of objective knowledge lies in partiality rather than universality. According to Haraway, purely objective knowledge cannot exist within discourse; knowledge is always situated, positioned, and embodied—essentially a material product. Furthermore, questions of what is being spoken about, who is speaking, when, where, and why they speak are inseparably linked. Unlike Spivak, who presumes a separate subject to represent the voice of the subaltern woman, Haraway argues for a subject that is inherently connected to its object. Moreover, the object of knowledge is not passive or inactive; rather, subjects and objects dynamically intertwine within discursive processes to construct partial truths.

By reconsidering Spivak’s negative conclusion through Haraway’s concepts, this paper aims to analyze how contemporary Korean women artists engage with the globalized art world to articulate their art and whether speaking through art is indeed possible. The premise of this research is that the artist, as the speaking subject, presents work from a partial perspective, and the work itself is interpreted by other subjects with partial and situated perspectives. It is not easy for subaltern artists to raise their voices because there are always other, louder voices that seek to overshadow them. The key question, then, is: who, when, where, and how do they attempt to speak?


II. Cyborg Without Gender, Race, or Class?

This section compares the voices of Lee Bul and those of domestic and international critics by analyzing journal articles, exhibition catalogs, and artist interviews. The focus here is on the Cyborg, Monster, and the combined Anagram series, for the following reasons (Figures 1, 2, 3). Lee Bul first gained international recognition with works featuring fish adorned with beads and sequins.⁴ Louise Dompierre notes that Lee Bul introduced “irony and parody” in a less confrontational manner compared to earlier feminist performances, thereby allowing viewers to “uncover concepts in [her] work as in a game.”⁵ This approach evolved into the Cyborg and Monster series presented in 1997-1998. However, from this series onward, the open-ended possibilities within the works began to reveal subtle interpretative differences between critics from different regions and cultural backgrounds.

Most Korean scholars, aligning with the feminist discourse that was spreading in the domestic art scene at the time, associated Lee Bul’s work with body politics resisting gender oppression in a patriarchal society. They viewed Cyborg as a strategic intervention against the persistent male gaze even in the era of advanced technology.⁶ In contrast, Western scholars generally argued that Cyborg and Monster transcend gender frameworks. Swiss curator and art historian Roman Kurzmeyer described Lee Bul’s Cyborg as a complex image embodying “superhuman strength, technical prowess, and submission to mastery as a classical male fantasy,” referencing figures found in Korean and Japanese manga and anime as “fearless, invincible, and insensate beings—endowed, nonetheless, with unmistakably feminine sexual features and girlish faces.”⁷ However, a suspicious tone emerges in the depiction of the female cyborg as a victim. The headless, one-armed, and one-legged cyborgs are described as resembling “sad-looking female knights” rather than “invincible Amazons,” and the suspended form is likened to “marionettes” (Figure 1).⁸ Ultimately, Kurzmeyer concludes that Lee Bul’s Cyborg is a critical approach to “the fundamental human desire” for immortality.⁹ Suddenly, whether as invincible Amazons or dismembered victims, the female cyborgs are transformed into a representation of the universal human desire for transcendence. According to Rachel Kent, curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney, Lee Bul’s Cyborg and Monster explore two states of the human body—desire for physical perfection and the simultaneous fear of monstrosity. Kent interprets the ambiguous nature of the Anagram series, which combines elements of plants, insects, and machines, beyond the framework of gender. Kent argues, “[in] doing away with the traditional taxonomies of science and biology,” Lee’s monsters suggest that “empirical knowledge of the world about us is open to question and revision.” (Figure 3).¹⁰ Similarly, Jason Smith, in his review of Lee Bul’s Theatrum Orbis Terrarum series (2003), states that the artist has shifted interest from the female body to a broader understanding of diverse configurations of the body and its inhabitable spaces (Figure 4).¹¹

These analyses resonate with Lee Bul’s statement that, at the time, Korean feminist art criticism “conveniently” categorized the artist’s work within the prevailing discourse of “gender and the body,” but emphasized that “the so-called “monstrous” aspect of my work is about exceeding the prescribed boundaries, touching upon our fear and fascination with what cannot be categorized.”_¹² However, what cannot be classified or fully understood in Lee Bul’s work is not the limitation of universal human experience, as Western critics suggest. Instead, Lee views Cyborg and Monster as representations of gender.

The feminine forms of the cyborgs are a symptom of the ways in which, the seduction and the threat of bewildering technological advances have been sublimated into more controllable, more recognizable manifestations. Of course, the elements of menace and instability are still there, underneath the layers of intricate repression. … what I've done is essentially to push the logic of the masculine fantasy of the cyborg to its darkest extremes, to the point of convulsion, a shattering that ironically gives rise to proliferating, extravagant, auto-productive forms.¹³

The artist also expresses interest in the ideological process of producing stereotypes in images:

In regards to technology …, I’m trying to question who has the power to use it and what sorts of images and products are created through that power and its attendant ideologies.¹⁴

In short, Lee Bul is acutely aware of the power that ideologically produces and manipulates images and critically intervenes in this process through the “monstrous” elements in the work. Furthermore, the monstrous “female” figures are deeply related to issues of gender representation.

There is a noticeable difference in perspective between Korean and Western critics. Western scholars pay little attention to the specificity of gender and race. Interestingly, they tend to interpret Cyborg in gendered terms only when referencing Japanese manga and anime, where cyborgs are controlled by male characters and portrayed as “girls.” Lee Bul has acknowledged the inspiration from anime, stating:

So the original conception for the cyborgs began with animation images, especially Japanese anime and manga, which are prevalent in Korea as well. Much more so than Western images of robots and super-action heroes that are feminine, the Japanese and similar Korean cyborgs combine an ultra-violent, dystopian aspect with some mythical ideas about femininity, so you have cyborgs which have superhuman powers but also with recognizable feminine physical features and the characteristics of girls. Interestingly, these cyborgs always have a master, usually a young man or boy who programs and controls them. In essence, there is superhuman power, the cult of technology, and girlish vulnerability working in ambiguous concert within this image of the cyborg, and that’s what interests me.¹⁵

Despite Lee Bul’s explanation of the artist’s interest in the ambiguous nature of cyborg femininity—both violent and fragile—Western critics often reduce the work to portrayals of powerless woman victims, describing them as “marionettes” or “sad-looking female knights.”¹⁶ However, rather than framing this as a binary critique of Western scholars imposing victimhood on Asian women artists, it is more meaningful to explore the different contexts, perspectives, power relations, and dynamics that shape these interpretations.

The tendency to overlook gender and racial specificity contrasts with Donna Haraway’s A Cyborg Manifesto,¹⁷ which is frequently referenced in relation to Lee Bul’s work. When viewed through Haraway’s lens, Lee Bul’s cyborgs do not transcend the limits of the human body but instead represent social subjects structured within the constraints of gender, race, and class. Lee has stated familiarity with Haraway’s theories while expressing caution towards the optimism surrounding future technological societies:

Yes, I'm aware of Haraway’s theories, which these days seem to have been co-opted by the spectacle of the techno-sublime manufactured by the computer and biotech industries. There’s a forced triumphalism to this whole phenomenon, as if to deliberately repress any suspicion of potential failure or disaster.¹⁸

Based on the fact that Lee cited popular culture as the source of cyborg imagery, or by misinterpreting the above quote to suggest that Haraway’s manifesto itself represents technological “forced triumphalism,” many domestic and international critics have downplayed or ignored the shared perspectives between Haraway and Lee.¹⁹ For example, So-yeon Ahn states:

While acknowledging the provocative concepts proposed in A Cyborg Manifesto, Lee is reluctant to subscribe to the optimistic view of technology in Haraway’s vision of the future. In its stead, she mines the rich vein of cyborg manifestations in anime and manga …, which are also popular in Korea.²⁰

As indicated by the title, “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century,” Haraway maintains a socialist feminist identity while simultaneously critiquing from within the original unity of Marxism and psychoanalysis, which produce binary differences. According to Haraway, the myth of original unity—explained as the “phallic mother” from whom all humans must separate for the formation and development of labor, individuals, and gender—ultimately generates conflicting differences and intensifies “the domination over nature/women.”²¹ The alternative to this foundational unity is the cyborg. As “a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction,” the cyborg is inherently ironic because it does not presuppose a single origin.²² Furthermore, the cyborg is implicated in “the histories of militarism, psychiatry and communications theory, behavioral research and pharmacology, and information and information processing theories,” possessing socio-historical specificity as a “bastard offspring” not only of state socialism but also of militarism and patriarchy.²³ As Susan Hawthorne and Renate Klein point out, the fact that the U.S. military invented and popularized the internet challenges the notion of cyberspace’s transcendence. The term “cyber,” derived from the Greek word meaning “steersman” or “governor,” contains an ominous aspect of control beyond mere navigation of the web.²⁴

For Haraway, cyborgs—possessing specificity and materiality—can never be universal beings that transcend time and space. Even when referred to as inhabitants of a “post-gender world,” they are not entities that exist beyond gender. Haraway’s opposition to essentialism’s emphasis on gender difference stems from the fact that essentialism advocates a universal gender identity.²⁵ In opposition to unified universality, Haraway emphasizes permanent partial identity. In the cyborg world, “people are not afraid of their joint kinship with animals and machines, not afraid of permanently partial identities and contradictory standpoints.” In essence, Haraway’s cyborg feminism resists universalism by supporting postmodern identities that emerge from otherness, difference, and specificity.²⁶

A close examination of Haraway’s cyborg theory reveals that it is not concerned with the triumph of technology surpassing human limitations, but rather, it is a declaration of partial and specific identities that reject all forms of universality, including gender. This cyborg concept aids in understanding the ironic duality of Lee Bul’s Cyborg and its “dark doppelgänger,”²⁷ Monster, and sheds light on how Lee critiques and produces multi-layered and partial images of identity, addressing the ambivalent perceptions of femininity within male-dominated Korean society.


III. Globalization, Global Feminism, and the Korean Women Artist

What kind of socio-discursive environment led to Lee Bul’s Cyborg being labeled as either a representation of a universal being devoid of gender and race or as a stereotype of a non-Western woman subject? Lee Bul gained international recognition through participation in international exhibitions, including biennials, which flourished in the 1990s. Along with critical discourse, newly developed international art institutions and the art market’s networks function as filtering systems that homogenize the art of Korean women artists.

In Art Incorporated, Julian Stallabrass questions the utopian view of globalization by revealing how the concept of ‘free art’ is linked to the ‘free trade’ that underpins the global neoliberal economy.²⁸ As Stallabrass points out, the international art world has undergone radical changes since 1989—not only due to political and economic transformations such as the reunification of Germany, the collapse of the Soviet Union, international trade agreements, and China’s partial embrace of capitalism—but also due to postmodern critique, feminism, and the resistance of racialized others. The proliferation of multicultural exhibitions such as Magiciens de la Terre (1989) at the Centre Pompidou and The Other Story (1989) at the Hayward Gallery, as well as biennials and international art fairs in the 1990s, were a result of these changes.²⁹ While criticisms that these exhibitions exoticized third-world art are valid, it is also true that such events provided non-Western artists with critical and commercial success.³⁰ Although the art world appears to pursue diversity and abandon universality, the reality is different. According to Stallabrass, the filtering systems of the art world ultimately produce homogeneity. Since the primary audience of biennials consists not of locals but of cosmopolitan audiences, their exhibition structures follow international models.³¹ Furthermore, “nomadic international curators” move exhibitions from place to place, reinforcing this homogeneous model and contributing to the production of “art that responds to international concerns.”³² The optimism that globalization would weaken the homogeneity of the art world is merely an illusion, as the ideal of ‘free art’ does not fundamentally contradict the ideals of ‘free trade’ that underpin the global neoliberal economy. The alignment of art prices and sales volumes with stock market trends, as well as the overlap between global financial centers and major art markets, is no coincidence.³³

Market logic also influences corporate sponsorship of art. Examples of influential corporate sponsorship include the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, which sponsored Lee Bul’s 2007 solo exhibition, and the Hugo Boss Prize, for which Lee Bul was a finalist in 1998. Grazia Quaroni, the Collection Director of Fondation Cartier, emphasizes the institution’s social responsibility to provide a “crossroad where the most disparate genres of art, knowledge, and civilizations would come together and dialogue in a truly cosmopolitan spirit.” Quaroni states that in pursuit of this goal, the foundation aims to support art on a “global scale” that goes beyond the narrow confines of the contemporary art world and dominant cultural spheres.³⁴ The logic of the market enables global corporations to contribute to the globalization of art. It is not difficult to find lists of sponsoring corporations and institutions in biennale catalogs. As Stallabrass points out, biennials create a network of sponsors, including corporations seeking to enhance their global brand recognition, nations promoting their cultural heritage, regional institutions striving for economic and cultural revitalization, universities aiming to improve their research rankings, and nomadic curators traversing the globe in search of promising artists and artworks.³⁵

Since the market logic of neoliberal free trade underpins the globalized art world, the international art economy is fundamentally influenced by the homogenizing culture of capitalism. How, then, can we understand the contradiction within the art world’s multiculturalism, which seeks the ‘specific and different’? In The Condition of Postmodernity, David Harvey argues that globalization has significantly transformed the spatial and temporal dimensions of social life. Space has contracted to the extent that it can be referred to as a ‘global village’ or ‘spaceship earth’ due to communication networks, while the temporal horizon has become so compressed that the present appears to encompass everything.³⁶ However, Harvey asserts that this “time-space compression” does not necessarily lead to a uniform global space. Instead, as barriers diminish, capitalists exploit the micro-differences of each space to extract better yields, and those who control these spaces strive to attract fluid capital by investing in spatial development. Paradoxically, as spatial barriers erode, the unique characteristics of geographical environments become more important than ever, resulting in “fragmentation, instability, and short-term uneven development” within the highly integrated global space.³⁷

This contradictory logic of globalization, which exploits difference, manifests similarly in the art world. The multiculturalism of the art world reflects the uniformity of global capitalist culture rather than diversity. For example, the exhibitions Global Feminisms: New Directions in Contemporary Art (2007) and WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution (2007), which ambitiously sought to discuss feminist art beyond the European and American narratives, were ultimately criticized for questionable homogenization that suppressed diversity. Lee Bul’s Ein Hungerkünstler (2004) was included in Global Feminisms (Figure 5), but it was difficult to present an alternative voice within the framework of the exhibition. The work was displayed alongside Passage (2004-2005) by British artist Jenny Saville and I Look Just Like My Daddy (2004) by American artist Cass Bird. Curator Maura Reilly stated that the three works were placed together because they featured gender-ambiguous figures.

Saville presents the viewer with a “gender outlaw,” a liminal figure irreducible to one gender or sex. … Exhibited near the Saville sketch is a cyborg sculpture by South Korean artist Lee Bul. Hybrids of machines and organisms, cyborgs are celebrated by cyberfeminists as creatures in “a monstrous world without gender,” as Donna Haraway explains. … Adjacent to that object, the American artist Cass Bird offers a photograph of a gender-ambiguous individual with cutoff shirt, tattoos, and a baseball cap bearing the words “I Look Just Like My Daddy.’³⁸

Fluid gender identity is a key concept in American and Western European feminist discourse, yet the exhibition’s conceptual framework risked overlooking the issues of Korean woman gender representation raised by Cyborg and Monster, instead presenting them as transcendent, universal images. Lee Bul’s work must be understood within the specific social context in which the artist creates and lives. It is not a matter of non-Western woman artists being incompatible with Western discourse or dominant discourse erasing and marginalizing the true meaning of their work. Rather, the key lies in examining how specific exhibitions, institutions, and feminist discourses frame, categorize, and define their work and what effects these dynamics produce.

How can Korean woman artists challenge these frameworks? Should they emphasize national and racial identity to counter universalization that erases differences? This strategy can be a double-edged sword, potentially differentiating and limiting the artist and their work as an exotic ‘other’ to Western peers. Should they instead strive to transcend national and racial identity? This is fundamentally impossible. Instead, attention should be paid to the fact that within the framework of homogenization and universalization, only a certain level of acceptable and digestible difference is permitted. What happens if elements that are unpermitted, heterogeneous, and hybrid subtly emerge?


IV. Speaking in the Globalized Art World: ‘Mimicry’ Between Universality and Specificity

To address the question of how Korean women artists can introduce otherness into the Western, male-centric globalized art world, this section references postcolonial concepts proposed by Homi Bhabha (b. 1949) in The Location of Culture, particularly the notion of mimicry. This concept reveals that Lee Bul’s art does not present outright negation but rather demonstrates a subtle strategy that appeals to and simultaneously challenges the Western art world.

The interpretation of Lee Bul’s Cyborg and Monster as dismembered Asian machine-women and threatening creatures corresponds to what Bhabha describes as stereotyping, an ideological strategy that constructs and fixes otherness. However, as Bhabha points out, stereotyping is a “complex, ambivalent, contradictory mode of representation, as anxious as it is assertive.”³⁹ Consequently, interpretations of Lee Bul’s work inherently include both fascination with women and attempts to resolve the anxiety that they may overwhelm the viewer. Lee Bul was acutely aware of this ambivalence and adopted it as a subject matter, which can also be understood as a specific postcolonial strategy employed by the Korean women artist.

A deeper understanding of this dual stereotyping can be achieved through the concept of fetishism. While Freud viewed fetishism as a psychological mechanism used by the male subject to deny sexual difference and the resulting castration anxiety, Bhabha reinterprets it as a means of denying racial difference.⁴⁰ According to Bhabha, colonizers replace the threatening image of the colonized with a fetishized stereotype, which must be “almost the same, but not quite” as the colonizer.⁴¹ If full equivalence were established, the ideological justification for colonial domination would collapse.⁴² On the other hand, the “partial identification” with the colonized subject forces the colonizer to confront an incomplete and fragmented image of their own identity, thereby undermining the presumed wholeness of their self-perception. Due to this ambivalence and partiality, stereotyping reveals a desire for a “pure and undifferentiated origin,” which remains an “impossible object.”⁴³

Bhabha argues that the colonizer’s anxiety about this impossible object creates a space for resistance by the colonized subject, which takes the form of mimicry—a form of imitation that subtly mocks. As David Huddart explains, mimicry is not “slavish imitation” or the colonized subject’s assimilation into the dominant culture but rather an exaggerated imitation of language, culture, manner, and ideas that generate “repetition with difference.”⁴⁴ According to Bhabha, for mimicry to be effective, it must “constantly produce slippage, excess, and difference,” allowing it to function as both a reinforcement of colonial power and a subversive sign of resistance from within. Because mimicry entails “repetition with difference,” it becomes a form of mockery. The “almost the same but not quite” ambivalence that mimicry produces exposes the colonial subject as a “partial presence,” indicating that they can never fully recover a complete identity. Thus, mimicry destabilizes the authority of colonial discourse by highlighting cultural, racial, and historical differences.⁴⁵

Let us now examine how Lee Bul challenges the male-dominated Western art world—not through overt differentiation but through slippage, excess, and difference. Since the artist’s early works, such as the rotting fish adorned with beads and sequins that evoke both the domestic labor of working-class Korean women and the ornate accessories of Eastern femininity, Lee Bul has utilized multilayered ambivalence.⁴⁶ Through series such as Cyborg, Monster, and Anagram, which explore the ambiguity between universal forms devoid of gender and race and the specificity of gendered and racialized representation, Lee Bul engages in mimicry as a strategy. The Mon grand récit series, which began in 2005, is particularly suitable for analyzing this strategy. Composed of dystopian architectural imagery, this series incorporates symbols from Korean modern history as well as utopian symbols representing the ideology of Western modernism.⁴⁷ Western audiences, familiar with Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International (1920), may interpret Lee Bul’s Mon grand récit: Because Everything… (2005) (Figure 6) as an homage to the ideals and failures of Soviet socialism. However, their interpretation might shift upon encountering Thaw (Takaki Masao) (2007) (Figure 7). Upon learning that Takaki Masao is, in fact, the Japanese name of Park Chung-hee, the Republic of Korea’s autocratic president during the 1960s and 1970s, from when he was in military training at Japanese imperial stronghold Manchuko during World War II, their understanding of the work may change. Similarly, in Bunker (Mikhail Bakhtin) (2007) (Figure 8), learning about Bakhtin’s exile and suppression, as well as the tragic fate of Korea’s last imperial descendant Yi Gu (1931–2005), might further complicate their interpretation. Will the works still appear as universal critiques of distorted modern ideals, or will they lead to the realization that “translation” of their socio-historical specificity is impossible? Focusing on this “untranslatability of socio-historical specificity” may help answer the question of “how Korean women artists can speak.”

The title Mon grand récit (My Grand Narrative) alludes to Jean-François Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition (1984), which argues that the grand narratives that governed modern society have ended, and that the postmodern era is characterized by fragmented and localized “small narratives.” Lee Bul’s series is often interpreted as a “universal” commentary on the utopia and failure of modernism. Art historian Charles Green states that he prefers a “determinedly global perspective” over the “contemporary art criticism’s hermeneutics of nationality.” He argues that since the “parts” of modernity have already been archived, Lee Bul could incorporate the “wreckages” of European and American modernism into the artist’s work, making it impossible to classify by ethnicity, region, or gender.⁴⁸

However, as Ahn Soyeon points out, by titling the series My Grand Narrative, Lee Bul transforms the collective experience of modernity into a personal one, suggesting that there was never a singular grand narrative—only fragmented, localized experiences.⁴⁹ Modernism’s grand narrative is nothing more than a fragmented, localized experience—My grand narrative. Mon Grand Récit: Weep into Stones... (2005) is filled with structures that symbolize the ruins and remnants of Western modernist utopian projects. The central white mountain-like structure evokes the skyscrapers depicted in The Metropolis of Tomorrow (1929), which influenced the Gotham City imagery in Batman. Among the smaller structures attached to it, one can recognize Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International (1920), various architectural designs of Russian Constructivism, and an inverted cross-section of the Hagia Sophia. The work also includes elements such as the modern apartment staircases from La Dolce Vita and a highway overpass, which is made of a bent-plywood. Bent-plywood was originally developed as splints for injured soldiers during World War II.⁵⁰ Mon Grand Récit: Because Everything... also features Tatlin’s monument and the utopian structures of the Constructivists, once again surrounded by gloomy landscapes dominated by elevated highways.⁵¹ All these symbols seem to have been drawn from what Charles Green refers to as “the archive of shared modernist history.” However, as James Lee points out, Lee Bul strategically intertwines these grand narrative icons with personal stories. The small concrete building protruding from a cliff in Weep into Stones... is, according to Lee, “typical of the architecture of rapidly built-up urban Korea of the 1970s, a period of brutally enforced modernization under a fascist military regime.” It was the location of Lee Bul’s first studio and had previously served as the headquarters of a mining labor union. For the artist, the site holds additional significance, as Lee Bul was born in a mining village in Gangwon Province to parents involved in leftist activism.⁵² Moreover, the overpass that appears in both pieces recalls Lee Bul’s video work Anthem (2000), which prominently features the Cheonggye Overpass. Built in 1976 during Park Chung-hee’s regime by covering the Cheonggyecheon stream, the overpass was once a symbol of industrialization and modernization, but by the time Lee Bul engaged with it, the surrounding area had become a dilapidated urban space.

Of course, viewers unfamiliar with the specific references to Korea’s modern and contemporary history can still relate to the artwork. As Lee Bul states, unexpected connections exist between places and figures across different periods, and the artist approaches these connections from “oblique angles” rather than through overly familiar events or figures.⁵³ Furthermore, Lee Bul does not strictly differentiate between East and West or even hold onto a firm national identity. When asked how the artist knows so much about Western culture, Lee responded, “I never knew this was only yours” and went on to say, “I grew up studying this field, so I never think about this as ‘Western’ history or ‘Western’ culture.”⁵⁴ If national or regional distinctions are not fixed categories, how can Lee Bul’s references to Korean modern and contemporary history function as a strategy of “slippage, excess, and difference” that challenges universality through the tactic of “differentiated repetition” (mimicry)? According to Lee Bul, the referenced figures and events can only be narrated through “fragmentation” and “ambiguity,” alerting viewers to the impossibility of fully translating such historical references.

Though obviously inadequate, fragmentation seems to offer the only possible way for me to arrive at something we might agree upon as a “general experience” of history or humanity—which necessarily would have to be ambiguous enough, and also permeable enough, to have a sort of, for lack of a better term, universal relevance.⁵⁵

Since all personal and collective experiences are fragmented and ambiguous, they are also only partially audible. Hence, Lee Bul emphasizes that:

[T]he more relevant question is not whether we can or should speak, but rather, whether we can or should hear, since the “silence” in this context seems more connected to our destiny as human beings to be able to hear only fragments.⁵⁶

On one hand, Lee Bul employs a universal visual language that appeals to the international art world. On the other hand, the artist never avoids the specific socio-historical reality of Korea, in which “the gravity of tradition conflicts with ‘development first’ policy,” and which is constantly stereotyped as a young and feeble woman in spite of the deep-rooted patriarchal order.”⁵⁷ By responding to the concerns of the globalized art world while simultaneously challenging the Western male-dominated art world with a different, partial, and ambiguous voice, Lee Bul asserts the artist’s ability to speak.


V. Conclusion

Let us return to the performance at Art Sonje Center. Lee Bul explained that the performance was an attempt to demonstrate “the emergence of different meanings by utilizing various rules and mechanisms that constitute texts.” While acknowledging that Lee resisted these texts by using their “fragments,” Lee Bul also admitted being fully aware that such attempts are bound to fail. Nevertheless, the artist declared a commitment to persist in the endeavor of creating alternative meanings. By “running away with all her might” from attempts to define art, Lee Bul enacts what Homi Bhabha describes as “slippage.” This leads us to realize that the core issue is no longer whether the subaltern artist can speak, but rather whether one can truly listen to the partial voice that is given—no matter how unfamiliar, ambiguous, or unsettling it may be. The subaltern artist has always spoken in partial language, and an audience that acknowledges their own partial capacity for listening has been able to hear that voice. If they fail to hear it, it is perhaps due to their denial of their own limitations and an overestimation of their interpretative abilities. Such an audience may assume they “fully understand” what the subaltern is attempting to convey and even claim the authority to represent their voice, ultimately appropriating it.

Gayatri Spivak’s response in the late 1980s—that “the subaltern cannot speak”—should not be understood as a closed conclusion. In a globalized society, including the art world, where power structures based on race, gender, age, and economic status continue to marginalize certain groups and render their voices unheard, the question remains urgent. Can the subaltern artist speak? Without listeners, the artist cannot speak. If we pursue homogeneity that erases the hybridity these voices create, the subaltern artist is silenced. What should be done if subaltern artists are speaking but remain unheard? This question must persist.