Lee Bul

Lee Bul

Willing To Be Vulnerable - Metalised Balloon , 2022 

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This futuristic installation, Willing To Be Vulnerable - Metalised Balloon, recalls the infamous Hindenburg airship (the basis of its design), which was Germany's proud symbol of progress in the early 1930s until it caught fire and was destroyed in 1937. Both circus and exposition are symbols of the modern era. Once tremendously popular and attractive, they have become obsolete and historical. Although contemporary variations have been developed, the festive and "modern" image evoking the feeling of a modern-era circus and exposition is a thing of the past, part of our collective memory.

The Willing To Be Vulnerable series recreates symbols and fragments of modernity on a monumental scale, but by using lightweight and airy materials such as transparent film and tent fabric, giving them an elusive quality. In addition, fans are used to blow air into the exhibition space, causing the lightweight materials and surfaces to continually flutter. The hanging Metalised Balloon, for example, is not only made of aluminium foil (which gives it its metalised surface), but the aluminium foil is coated with a delicate thin cloth, which flaps like a butterfly, like a vulnerable skin of a small living creature.

As a whole, the Willing To Be Vulnerable installations create an immersive space filled with the visceral and palpable memory of a fading or faded modernity. The space is also littered with enormous fabrics, designed to form shapes redolent of mountains, rocks and streams. Together, they echo a landscape - the skin of a structure that can reach my skin, that my skin can feel. The tangibility, monumental and vulnerable, reverberates throughout the exhibition. The sensations are both physically and mentally immersive.

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