“The Cyborgs Have Always Been Zombies: South Korean Body Politics and Lee Bul’s Body Art” a Pulse of Art History lecture

This presentation revisits the early body art of Korean artist Lee Bul before she became internationally renowned for her Cyborg series (1991-present) and dystopia-themed sculpture series (2002-present). I read Lee’s early art as not only having a formative effect on her later works, but also a response to South Korean government’s control over women’s reproductive rights: its decades-long abortion bans and family planning campaigns to curb female fertility. I argue that zombie, a figure that often indicates the status of social death in critical theories, helps locate Lee’s artistic critique against the modernizing South Korea’s developmentalist and masculine visions.

Soyi Kim is the inaugural LB Korean Studies Research Scholar for the East Asia Program, Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies

Dr. Kim's work creatively brings together urgent questions about the ethics and politics of epidemiology and a critical humanities approach to aesthetic problems in art and digital cultures. Dr. Kim’s work, while situated in visual studies, is truly interdisciplinary, and seeks to place Korean art and visual culture in historical and cultural context. While her work is not history of medicine per se, it engages with biopolitics as Koreans encountered first Japanese, and then American imperial occupation, and a diverse series of medical and bureaucratic interventions which have directly affected the bodies and health of Koreans.