Korean artist Lee Bul’s new Seoul exhibition shows what came after her shocking beginnings

What happens when a body once used to protest grows into a vessel for something greater?

When Lee Bul first stormed onto Korea’s art scene in the late 1980s, she did so with bodily defiance – a force that shocked, unsettled and jolted others awake.

In 1989, she dangled nude from the rafters of a Seoul theatre, with ropes biting into her skin as she spoke of her own abortion, then still a criminal act in the country.

The following year, she roamed the streets of Korea and Japan in a grotesque costume of flesh and tentacles. For 12 days, passers-by gawked and recoiled at her unruly presence. Her answer to their stares came in the performance’s wry title: “Sorry for Suffering – You think I’m a puppy on a picnic?”

By 1997, her works reached New York’s Museum of Modern Art, where she unveiled the infamous Majestic Splendor, rows of dead fish sealed in plastic bags, their scales bedazzled with cheap sequins. The work embodied a visceral tension between glittering ideals of feminine beauty and decaying bodies. But the odour grew so noxious that it forced the museum to pull it from view within days.

Curiously, the artist’s new mid-career survey at Seoul’s Leeum Museum of Art – “Lee Bul: From 1998 to Now” – bypasses the shock and stench of her sensational beginnings, starting instead with what came after.