With a little less than two months to the first ever Bangkok Art Biennale, festival organisers have been giving audiences exciting little treats to bridge the wait.
The festival, which will take place from Oct 19 to Feb 3, will bring in 75 artists from 33 countries, exhibiting across iconic and well-known sites within the city. Exploring the theme of "Beyond Bliss", Thai and foreign visitors will get to witness and participate in artworks by megastars like Marina Abramovic, Yayoi Kusama and even Jean Michel Basquiat to just name a few. And one of these groundbreaking artists, Lee Bul, came to Bangkok last week amid her hectic schedule to give a talk at Central Embassy's Open House.
Standing in front of the crowd wearing a loose, all-black outfit, Bul, who seemed a bit reluctant to delve into both her history and the meaning of her pivotal artworks, talked generally about her current retrospective solo exhibition "Crashing" at London's Hayward Gallery.
A leading contemporary artist from South Korea, Lee Bul has worked for 20 years in every genre of art from guerrilla performances, large scale installations, drawing, painting, video and sculpture. Never repeating herself, she delves into philosophical questions and issues of feminism, politics and the blurred lines between utopia and dystopia -- taken from her own experience growing up under South Korea's military dictatorship, which only ended in 1979.
Bul has been known to create highly powerful and radical artworks which sit between the beautiful and grotesque. During her early artistic years -- when South Korea was still a country where women were allowed only one hairstyle, forbidden from showing more than 20cm of leg above the knee, and where abortion was (and still is) illegal -- Bul performed anti-authoritarian monologues by dangling naked and upside down from the ceiling, lamenting about her own experience with abortion to an equally distressed crowd. She took part in other shocking and bewildering guerrilla performances, eventually shifting gears as audiences started to become desensitised to her messages.
She moved on to her famous cyborg sculptures which explored beauty, the female body, and womanhood. Now, Bul is engaging with ideas of society and social structures -- exploring the fine line between utopia and dystopia in massive-scale installations.
During her short visit to Bangkok, Bul didn't talk much about her upcoming show in the city, not even mentioning where it will be held. Anticipating fans must wait and see.
"This is the first biennale [here]," she said. "So it's a little bit heavy [on my shoulders]. Biennale doesn't mean it's only happening one time. This is a project for the long term. So hopefully we can make a very good show, and hopefully it's successful."
