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Korean artist and sculptor Lee Bul began her career in the late 1980s, just as feminism was beginning to emerge in her country, and her work reflects this, especially as it explores the ways in which Eastern and Western perceptions of femininity have clashed and interwoven. In her Monster and Cyborg series, exhibited in Vienna and Glasgow, Lee has sought to bring together apparently contradictory notions of power and traditional feminine virtue. "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." she says. One of her previous projects, Hydra, featured photographs of the artist wearing a traditional Asian robe with fishnet stockings and knee-high boots, another attempt to challenge cross-cultural stereotypes about the role of women.

The trouble is that Lee´s work contains nothing new. Much of what she is saying was said by Western feminists in the 1970s. Watching her catch up, from her own delayed cultural perspective, offers little more than a curious sideshow. The images in Hydra are supposed to make viewers rethink submissive notions about Asian women, but first and foremost they are presenting their subject as an object to be admired for her physical qualities. In the context of modern western society, the fishnets and the boots are not as daring as they might seem, since they have long ceased to be associated with transgressively assertive behaviour; nor are they any longer emblematic of submission or prostitution. Some critics have compared Lee´s self-portraits to Cindy Sherman´s, but this only emphasises the fact that she lacks Sherman´s versatility. Her examination of objectification provides only more of the same.

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Written by: Jennie Kermode
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