Lee Bul: Long Tail Halo

Published 15/04/2025

Lee Bul: Long Tail Halo

Lee’s headless heroines and canines are the fifth of the Met’s Genesis Facade Commissions. But what do the Korean artist’s sculptures represent, and what are the influences behind these fantastic creatures?

Lee Bul. Left: Long Tail Halo: CTCS #1, 2024; Right: Long Tail Halo: CTCS #2, 2024. Stainless steel, ethylene-vinyl acetate, carbon fibre, paint, polyurethane. Courtesy the artist. Images: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Photo by Eugenia BurnettTinsley.

The Met Fifth Avenue Facade, New York
Until 10 June 2025

by YASMEEN M SIDDIQUI

Headlessness is a physical trait that recurs in Lee Bul’s sculpture, including two of the four works that comprise The Genesis Facade Commission: Lee Bul, Long Tail Halo at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. Headlessness is, it seems, a red herring – an allusion to the Winged Victory of Samothrace at the top of the Daru staircase at the Louvre, or to decapitated antique relics and sculptures, symbols of world orders gathered broken or broken en route to plinths built by inheritors and subsequent powerbrokers and meaning-makers. When did their heads fall off?

Lee Bul. Laughing, 1994. Video documentation for original performance, A Space, Toronto 18 min 48 sec. © Lee Bul. Courtesy of the artist.

Thirty years ago, Lee performed Laughing (1994) at A Space, one of Toronto’s oldest artist-run spaces. The South Korean artist moved through the gallery, collapsing the artifice of spectatorship conventionally asserted by the installation of works, a backdrop and the spot where the visitor views the work. I was a university student taking a break from my subject, medieval Islamic art, navigating the room, all the people, the sudden and shocking loudness. Her performance, a rapid exposure to contemporary politics, rattled my stubborn wish to distance culture and art from politics, the foundational reason for studying what I studied, a reified subject, so I thought. Today, her works span the niches of the Met. Fifth Avenue in New York is an artery in the soft city of my middle age. Four sculptures pour forth despite their mass and solid form from the sturdy museum entrance.

A view to and from the facade
Over the course of decades and through different mediums, Lee shatters canned understanding of the ways humans navigate and internalise power. In ballpoint pen and marker drawings, for instance Study for Mon Grand Récit, Circular Prison, there are many ideas that recur in later drawings and sculptures. The spherical architectural development is pivotal to the solidification of an extraordinarily complex approach to surveillance. The form – and its ways of ordering human movement, and thus behaviour – was devised for mental asylums and prisons, and is now seen in libraries, universities, hospitals and museums. It affords the ability to look all around, almost at once: a full panorama, a 360-degree vantage point from which power and order sit and manage.

Lee Bul. Study for Mon grand récit, 'Circular Prison', 2005. Ballpoint pen and marker on paper, 29.7 x 20.6 cm. © Lee Bul. Photo: Jeon Byung-cheol. Courtesy of the artist.

Lee’s practised grasp of the ways spaces and spectacle interact is at play and apparent in her treatment of the Met Facade and the integration of four sculptures into its niches. This, the fifth in a series of Met commissions (Wangechi Mutu, 2019; Carol Bove, 2021; Hew Locke, 2022; and Nairy Baghramian, 2023), riffs on the ebb and flow of the street to anchor and protect the museum, a place and an idea, a repository, our memory across time and space.

Installation view of The Genesis Facade Commission: Lee Bul, Long Tail Halo, 2024. Courtesy the artist. Image: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, photo by Eugenia Burnett Tinsley.

Megalithic forms with architectural and topographical antecedents have allowed Lee to push her inquiry into power and memory that has always rested on the study of high modernisms out of the European context. The figures flow towards and over and around passersby. From afar, Long Tail Halo: CTCS #2 (2024) postures with the fortitude of a warrior: the figure is planted tall on a base that up close alludes to a city, buildings.

Lee Bul. Installation view, Long Tail Halo: The Secret Sharer III, 2024. Stainless steel, polycarbonate, acrylic, polyurethane. Courtesy the artist. Image: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, photo by Eugenia Burnett Tinsley.

Flanking its right is Long Tail Halo: The Secret Sharer III (2024), a companion that spills towards the steps, tracking the watchers, discerning what to convey, what to withhold/hold. It is materially sturdier, more robust than its predecessors, including The Secret Sharer (2012), a stainless-steel frame bedazzled in glass and acrylic beads. All four forms move with grace and in tandem, without the vigour of the futurist Umberto Bocciono’s Unique Forms of Continuity in Space (1913, cast 1931 or 1934) that live in the galleries inside, a sculpture the artist has indicated is important to her way of seeing space and time and movement. With Long Tail Halo, all four are on guard, neither on the offensive, nor at war.

Lessons learned from the expressionist architect Bruno Taut about space and the interplay of naturalism within exploratory architectures map a productive channel for Lee to tap into. Utopias anchor the Russian philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin’s thoughts about the bunker.

Bakhtin contributes an interpretation of history that allows for fragmentation in storytelling, narrative building and theories of social language. Lee, having grown up near a military base, struggled to maintain shelter, which often took the form of a light paper door, a thin veil between her and the outside, affecting a mirage, the illusion of security, this manifests in her research and representation of concrete architectures. Architectures are visible and alluded to in the cuts and the stitches achieved through soldering of materials that make Long Tail Halo: CTCS #1, and the structural, foundational forms that are the base of Long Tail Halo: CTCS #2.

Lee Bul. Installation view, Long Tail Halo: The Secret Sharer II, 2024. Stainless steel, polycarbonate, acrylic, polyurethane. Courtesy the artist. Image: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, photo by Eugenia Burnett Tinsley.

Transformed bodies
In the 1990s, Lee began a body of work, a counterpoint to the soft, fabric sculptures that speak of internal bodiliness. Her Cyborg and Anagram series have been described as doppelgangers, but I prefer to understand them as counterpoints within a whole, as opposed to a mirroring or twin. Cast silicone, polyurethane filling and paint pigment. Extenuated, pointed breasts, nipples erect, an arm gesturing forward with an open palm, fingers ready to grasp hold, a singular leg, muscles activated, ready to spring forward, a hip socket accentuated by a flaring that suggests clothing that shapes into a clam shell, this hyper-feminised figure suggests regeneration.

Lee has used mother-of-pearl because of its property as a material that is self-generated by the mollusc to heal wounds. However, the cyborg is headless, and without a connection to the brain there can be no true integration of the natural human body and its artificial augmentations. The work is a conundrum that pushes well beyond a straightforward thinking about how science and technology are impacting what it is to be human, or gendered. By deciding to allude to cybernetic bodies as headless, Lee has pushed us to think about power and politics.

Lee Bul. Thaw (Takaki Masao) II, 2007/2017. FRP, fibreglass, leather, acrylic paint, 36 x 27.5 x 85 cm. Installation view of Lee Bul: Crash, Gropius Bau, 2018. © Lee Bul. Photo: Mathias Völzke. Courtesy of Gropius Bau.

In 1980, less than a year after Lee’s family settled in Seoul, more than 250,000 citizens of Gwangju protested the declaration of martial law by Chun Doo-hwan, the new military strongman. Chun was called “the Butcher” for his savage tactics against dissidents; he had been a protege of his predecessor, Park Chung-hee, the authoritarian president who was assassinated by his own director of the Korea Central Intelligence Agency. During the Gwangju Uprising, which historians have compared to the Paris Commune (1871) and Tiananmen Square protests (1989), Chun deployed highly skilled paratroopers – trained to fight North Koreans – against the citizens of Gwangju. For a couple of days these untrained people, some armed with weapons taken from local police stations, held back Chun’s soldiers and formed a civilian government. Thaw (Takaki Masao) II (2007/17), made of fibreglass, leather and acrylic paint is a diminutive figure in contrast with the cyborgs. It is fully human, with waxed skin, bearing a pink undertone, strapped up so that testicles and phallus are crushed, head falling forward: this disgraced leader is the dictator General Park Chung-hee, a ghoulish figure whose rule defined Lee’s childhood and youth, one impacted and, perhaps, defined by militarisation, social control and military service.

A recent anthology of interviews, Lee Bul: In Her Words, sets the record straight on many fronts related to her practice and her politics. The bilingual volume starts from the back and from the front, with a magnificent cloth-bound hard cover and slip case. Published by BB&M Contemporary Art Books (2024) the volume coincides with the Met facade project curated by Lesley Ma, Ming Chu Hsu and Daniel Xu, curator in the museum’s department of modern and contemporary art.

Reading, we learn that Lee rejects the feminist scholar Donna Haraway’s definition of the cyborg. Her reasoned response to many who have strapped her sculptures to Haraway’s writings poked a look further into her thoughts on the interplay of technology on or with the human body. The forms of Boccioni, to whom Lee seems to respond, the pure form of her headless cyborgs, the monsters and the guardians at the Met suggest we might instead look to the French writer Valentine de Saint-Point. De Saint-Point, the futurist who wrote Manifesto of the Futurist Woman (1912) and Futurist Manifesto of Lust (1913), pierced holes in fundamental futurist ideas about gender and power, from within the radical ideology the futurists were developing. Through art and writing, De Saint-Point argued for the complete synthesis of forms in ways that provoked thoughts about androgyny, occultism and channelling libidinal forces to create utopias. Cyborg politics is the struggle for language and the struggle against the prevailing desire to create a perfect community – after the writings of Haraway (she will not be erased but posited as adjacent). Since 1994, technology has allowed for science to digitally encode the whole body and put it on the internet, providing minute medical information instantly. We know ourselves with speed and accuracy beyond human capacity as defined in real time, lunar time.

Haraway, in A Cyborg Manifesto, maps the necessity of theorising a realignment of the politics and poetics of the body and gender as it is assigned. Haraway’s cyborgs track to the satyrs of the ancient world and through the role of animal-human hybrids in folk tales and fairy stories. What do these adjustments to category achieve within the order of family. A comparatively staid and plodding text, yet fully radical, De Saint-Point’s Manifesto of the Futurist Woman includes ideas that resonate now as we continue the struggle to define feminism.

Language and structure that seemingly disavow rhetoric in this early 20th-century context, defined by the bombastic, must have been a choice given the writing’s clear rejection of gender as a meaningful classification and, in line with and in reaction to, the perverse and generative misogyny embedded in and twisted by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti in the Futurist Manifesto. Feminism is shelved as an outlook that has limited value for women in their push to assume intellectual, physical and psychic freedom. On the heels of the outpouring of the avant-garde manifestos, there are a bevy of post-first-world-war thinkers, including the likes of Haraway who emerged decades later, who have continued a tradition of expository thinking aloud on the page, in words for circulation, augmented in the hopes of radical readjustments of the world view and world making.

In her Manifesto of the Futurist Woman, De Saint-Point responds, in measured tone, contrasting starkly, provocatively, with Marinetti’s bombastic flare — the traits required to re-structure future modern humans.

Every superman, every hero, however epic, every genius, to the degree that he is powerful, is the prodigious expression of a race and of an epoch only because he is composed of feminine elements and masculine elements at the same time: he is a complete being.

An individual who is virile is nothing but a brute; an individual who is solely feminine is nothing but weakness.

When, instead, following tendrils and tangents, in this case from De Saint-Point to Haraway, there is an opportunity to amplify the ways radical ideas, in this case about gender, particularly in the context of differing political stakes.

Born Anne-Jeanne-Valentine-Marianne Desglans de Cessiat-Vercell, in Lyons in 1875, Valentine de Saint-Point was a relation of the illustrious writer and statesman Alphonse de Lamartine, who was buried in the mountain village of Saint-Point. Alongside her practice as a visual artist, her poetry began to appear as early as 1906 in Marinetti’s magazine, Poesia, a place for symbolist poems. The circulation of her poetry was bolstered by the publication of several books, including a trilogy, Trilogie de l’Amour et de la Mort, which initiated her approach to rooting out from traditional education the ways women were pigeonholed.

Theatre provided another platform for testing ideas about what womanhood encompasses. In 1909, she staged a production of Le Déchu, one of a trilogy of plays, Théâtre de la Femme, that also included plays never produced: La Race and L’Instinct.

De Saint-Point’s work challenged Marinetti, who struggled with her approach, chastising her in 1917 for denying the role of facial elements in her choreography and the staging of her performances, although he had preached the doctrine of facial immobility and emphasis on the body for its true heroic possibility. Nonetheless, the poetics of De Saint-Point’s contribution recur and can be seen in Giorgio de Chirico’s faceless mannequins.

Lee was born in 1964 and her childhood during the military dictatorship of General Park Chung-hee (who became president in 1963 but ruled from when he seized power in 1961 until his assassination in 1979) resonates in my mind as I make sense of the facade commission. Martial law reached into social life, and the rigid curtailment of freedoms, through restrictions such as limiting the length of men’s hair and the lengths of women’s skirts, point to the intricacy of social control. Born into a leftist family of dissidents, as the eldest child, Lee was responsible for her siblings during the years when her mother was imprisoned.

Lee’s performance, Abortion (1989), at the Dongsoong Art Center in Seoul established the artist’s capacity for endurance and sensory awareness. Audience members were given a lollipop to suck on, sweetness trickling across their tongues while they watched and listened. Performing daily for two to three hours at a stretch, Lee, fully naked, was bound by rope, raised feet first above ground level and left hanging, recalling the experience of abortion. The raw truth, her study of the body, questions around reproduction that evolve over time drew attention to issues related to replication and the place of the body in society. Bodies hung from above.

The move into public space, to remove the theatre and stage as determinants of the work, pushed Lee. Through Cravings (1988), Laughing (1994) and Sorry for Suffering – You Think I’m a Puppy on a Picnic? (1990), performances in the street, on trains, sometimes naked and at other times inhabiting costume, Lee allowed for a full reckoning with the inside and outside of the body.

Lee Bul. Laughing, 1994. Video documentation for original performance, A Space, Toronto 18 min 48 sec. © Lee Bul. Courtesy of the artist.

Lee’s performances wearing suits of what resemble the shape of entrails, pointing to the intricate connection between a body’s inside and outside are a starting point that begin a morphing into her cyborgs. The colour schemes vary widely. The textiles point to mass markets.

The widely circulated images of Cravings (1988) were the start of an archive documenting Lee’s performance where she would don a soft sculpture suit that seemed to weigh her down as she moved along, hugging the ground. They date to the 80s and 90s, the tendrils of the soft sculpture evoking associations with a deformed internal system of intestines, organs expanding from a core, a centre and then tapering off into impotent limbs marked by arteries and circuits forced to the surface. Lee wore three different soft sculptures in the Cravings performance, one of which was also worn for Sorry for Suffering – You Think I’m a Puppy on a Picnic? (1990). For this work she stands upright and wears the red sculpture. There are contrasting yet bound urges, or compulsions, perhaps better put as drives, themes and ideas these works evoke and consider that plague humans: our perpetually battling or measuring of cravings and aversions.

Lee Bul. Sorry for suffering—You think I'm a puppy on a picnic? 1990. Performance still, 12-day performance, Gimpo Airport, Korea; Narita Airport, Japan; downtown Tokyo; Tokiwaza Theater, Tokyo. © Lee Bul. Courtesy of the artist.

Lee’s externalisation of innards, as organs themselves or as metaphorical devices, is a part of her trajectory and her thinking about the body according to its own terms and in relation to others and place. A profusion of distended, tapered bio-forms is spliced with hands protruding outwards, fingers extended as if shocked into pointing, reaching, but unable to grasp anything. Duration no longer achieved her aim. The form, however, held sway in a broader examination that unfolds testing ideas about how technology can fundamentally change what we are. These soft sculptures and the Cyborg series from the 1990s rest adjacent to the cutting-edge lab led by biophysicist and engineer Hugh Herr at MIT’s Media Lab. It is here that developments in neuron body design have made strides. The question: what is and what is not biological, human and natural, is, perhaps, unknowingly shared in the work being done by Herr and by Lee.

Herr’s lab has developed synthetic body parts, particularly feet, that are able to communicate with the brain. Through the close study of nature and its replication, in extreme and dramatic contrast with what he describes as “civil war era” amputation techniques, Herr and his team have fully integrated the artificial with the natural, creating truly bionic people, a potential accentuating individual strength and power, moving us closer to being able to create true super humans. Lee and futurist De Saint-Point, and also our era’s Haraway, deconstruct gender, and the potentiality of Herr’s science brings their visions and forms closer to our lived reality or its future. All appear to note and represent the possibility of augmentation as central to achievement.

Often-touted statistics used to point out differentials between men and women, to argue for separation based on presumed, or generalised, strength quotient become negotiable. They are rendered optional. I am stronger, more coordinated than many men and some men are stronger, more coordinated than me. The impact of bionics goes well beyond simply the mechanical and physical: this new biotechnology, according to Herr in science, and Lee in art, re-maps the brain, allowing the full and complete integration of the synthetic and the natural. You feel your synthetic body.

While Lee articulates her scepticism about the possibility and hope for changed power dynamics, the headless cyborg provokes clear questions about the integration of man and machine. Who is the original being and where is the processor? First, the critical developments Herr suggests positively impact the disabled, and yet then move into troublesome terrain when elaborated as pushing humans towards achieving superhuman strength. The machines require a high level of maintenance. Augmented bodies when fully integrated have the capacity of re-mapping the brain. Bodies become monetised, attached to a warranty, and thus controlled.

Lee asks us to notice who is in control. What does the control protect, guard. Where in time have bodies been fully engaged, activated, at work. And what is work? What does work? The body, the brain, the machine, our bonds among women and our beloved canine companions? These questions grace the Met, are embedded in the four sculptures that compromise a whole. What fun it is to go for a walk these days.