Back to the Future: Lee Bul on why AI today is scarier than we imagined

“Many people interpret my Cyborgs through a gendered lens, as metaphors for beauty,” she says. “But they are anonymous, headless and lack individuality. Through them, I have always been exploring how power, including that of gender, intersects with technology. Those questions remain entirely relevant today.”

The M+ exhibition will feature more works than the Seoul show, with the additional works also displayed in future venues. Lee says each city’s architecture shaped her curatorial approach differently. She was drawn to how Leeum’s architect Rem Koolhaas inserted a “black box” into the underground gallery, creating what she describes as “architectural layering, a building within a building”. “If you think cinematically,” she adds, “it’s like Stanley Kubrick’s [1968 film] 2001: A Space Odyssey, where the capsule sits inside a bedroom. I planned that exhibition with that spatial idea in mind.” M+ offers a different architectural and cultural context. “Both Seoul and Hong Kong are technologically advanced and hyper-dense cities, but their atmospheres differ,” Lee says. She says that on her 2008 visit to Hong Kong for Mobile Art: Chanel Contemporary Art Container, she was reminded of sci-fi worlds such as those in Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982) or J G Ballard’s The Crystal World (1966) and Crash (1973). Returning to the city recently, she was struck by the “very classical space” of the newer museum. “I want my work to respond to that: exploring technology, humanity and architecture through both futuristic and classical approaches. That’s the intention behind this exhibition.”

There is one constant Lee has observed across regions, however: the future she imagined has materialised. “Actual human robot forms have been created. The Cyborg  mouse. It was the first time life was created scientifically, not through reproduction. It was shocking.”

That shock lingers today. “When I used cyborgs in my art, I didn’t imagine we’d live in such a future. But here we are,” she says. She is even more concerned about artificial intelligence. “When we think of cyborgs, we think of humanoids that look like us, which is probably why they create that immediate discomfort. But AI is even closer to the idea of human existence. It’s about immortality, recreation and regeneration.

“We are living in a frightening era,” Lee says. “Everyone is racing to stay ahead in technology, afraid of being left behind. We want to be first, but the direction is absurd. There isn’t enough debate” about the uses of AI, she says.

In her current practice, Lee addresses what she calls the “fascism of high technology”. “It’s urgent,” she says. “People say AI will bring happiness, abundance, freedom. But to think it will solve everything without considering life itself is childish. We must consider not only how technology appears on the surface, but also how it functions within social structures and relationships. Technology has always had a fragile side, which is that it’s constantly exposed to power and control. The question is: who gains power, and who controls it?”

Politics has long shaped Lee’s worldview. Born to left-wing activist parents who suffered persecution under South Korea’s former Yeonjaje family liability law, which punished families for an individual’s political offences, she grew up under surveillance. “We couldn’t walk freely or gather in groups of more than ten,” she recalls. “I realised early on that I couldn’t have a normal job or life.”

As a child, she was captivated by books such as Fabre’s Book of Insects (1921) by French naturalist Jean- Henri Fabre—she had an illustrated version of it—and art books about Leonardo da Vinci. “I thought artists engaged equally with humanity and rational thought. It seemed the perfect idea of a human being, so I decided to become one.”

Lee majored in sculpture at Hongik University in Seoul but found the experience “very disappointing”. “I had this fantasy in which university was a place where people like me gathered to have intense debates on art or dream up artistic visions together. But because of my family’s history, I had only been exposed to a small circle,” she says, adding with a chuckle, “I felt sorry for my classmates.”

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Adding to her disillusionment was the school’s curriculum, which focused on classical western art history—something she didn’t feel it would aid her career. “So I thought, ‘Forget this, let’s do something else.’ I started to do something completely different.” She began spending more time reading, particularly satire; and joined a theatre group and tried her hand at directing. “Because I was studying sculpture and visual art, as well as directing, combining the two naturally led to performance. I used the human body as material. I wanted to challenge conventional problems. And I wanted something that wouldn’t continue endlessly but would appear in a single moment. I wanted to emphasise that reaction, that ‘happening’ in the moment.”

Using her own body as the canvas, Lee created provocative performance art in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Abortion (1989), for example, saw her hang from the rafters of Seoul’s Dongsoong Arts Centre for nearly two hours, discussing her own experience of the then illegal procedure while handing out lollipops to the audience. Sorry for Suffering—You Think I’m a Puppy on a Picnic? (1990) featured Lee in a grotesque costume that consisted of tentacles and deformed limbs in red; it radically challenged ideas about both women’s bodies and roles in society and conventional sculptural art of the time.

She spent a decade doing performance art that explored physical and spiritual boundaries until it became, in her words, “dangerous”. “I wanted freedom, but I realised there was a gap between the liberation I sought and where I arrived. That gap was so large that I felt empty.” At first, she defined her pursuit as freedom from oppression, but gradually, she moved on to exploring freedom from being human itself—which is unrealistic to achieve. “That raised the question: what counts as human? One summer, I was on a bus driving over an overpass in Seoul. The window was open—looking out, I felt that if I jumped, I wouldn’t be pulled down by gravity. It was a moment when death didn’t feel frightening—when the fear over the boundary between life and death disappeared. I knew then that I was heading to extremes, and that my art had become dangerous.”

By the mid-1990s, Lee transitioned to sculpture and installations, while the themes of her work shifted from personal liberation to exploring systemic inequalities: themes that continue to shape her reflections on technology and gender today, including in the pieces that will be shown at the upcoming Hong Kong show.

Despite her global acclaim and the sensation her exhibitions create around the world, the 62-year-old remains humble about her success, remaining focused mainly on making more art. When asked what legacy she wants to pass on to the next generation of artists, she says, “If I say what my legacy should be, then it’s no longer authentic. It would be a lie. Some artists predict the future. But I don’t hope or wish for things.

“I only do what I can do, which is observing my surroundings and the issues around me. That’s what I will continue to focus on.”

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