Notes:
1. Allucquere Rosanne Stone, "Will the Real Body Please Stand Up>" in The CyberculturesReader,Eds. David Belland Barbara Kennedy (London: Routledge, 2000), pp.517-23.
2. The linguistic origin of "monster" is found in the Greek word "teras," which means an object of fright andwonder, or abhorrence and admiration. The word "teratology" also comes from the same origin. Historicallyspeaking, it was Aristotle who drew a connection between the female being and the monster. Defining themale body as the standard norm for the human body, the Greek philosopher maintained that a female baby isproduced when the processes of reproduction and growth deviate from the norm. He thus originated thelongstanding historical definition of woman as abnormality, monster and other. See Rosi Braidotti, "Signs ofWonder and Traces of Doubt: On Teratology and Embodied Differences" in Between Monster, Goddessesand
Cyborgs:Feminist Confrontations with Science,Medicine and Cyberspace,Eds. Braidotti and Nina Lykke (NewYork: Zone Books, 1996), pp.135-52.
3. Lee Bui in interview with Hans-Ulrich Obrist, "Cyborg and Silicone: Lee Bui and Her Art" in Lee Bui exhibition
catalog (Seoul: Artsonje Center, 1998), unpagenated.
4. Inspired by a 1970s feminist science fiction based on a certain research on brain transplant, "A Cyborg
Manifesto" posits the hybrid-form cyborg as a model for the post-gender mythology in the era of new

as wellreasonand universalism
or as a politicalmetaphor.Haraway'stheorycountersmasculinist
technologies,
as all dualistic thinking. The image of cyborg derives pleasure from blurring the boundaries of the binaries, suchas human/animal, organism/machine and matter/non-matter, and ultimately operates to destroy them.
Donna Haraway, "A Cyborg Manifesto," Simians,Cyborgs,and Women: The Reinventionof Nature (FreeAssociation Books, 1991 ), pp.149-82.
5. Sargassois an area in the north Atlantic inhabited by massive quantities of marine plant lives, was feared bysailors because of the hazardous condition. Amaryllis, the name of a flower in the lily family, means both ashepherdess and a succubus. Chrysalis,the larva before its metamorphosis into a butterfly or moth, wasthought to be related to witches and alchemy. Siren is the half-human female, half-bird sea fairy in Greek
mythology, which seduced seafarers to their death. Supernova,a star that emanates the most energy at themoment of its disappearance, was the title of a 2000 sci-fi film. In the film, the title specifically refers to amysterious object which provides youth and immortality.
6. The cyberpunks, who are leading contemporary culture, are mostly adolescent males, and the cyberimages
produced and consumed by them are extremely gendered and stereotypical, focusing on and reinforcing themale/female, rather than human/machine, distinction. See Judith Squires, "Fabulous Feminist Futures and theLure of Cyberculture" in The CyberculturesReader,pp.360-71.
7. Anne Balsamo, Technologiesof the GenderedBody: Reading Cyborg Women (Duke University Press, 1996),
pp.3-31
8. Anita Hagerman-Young and Kerry Wilks, "The Theater of the World" in Ed. Larry Norman, The TheatricalBaroque(University of Chicago, 2001 ), pp.36-45.

(translatedby Doryun M. Chong)

Editor's Note:
The following publications have been referenced for works by Hieronymus Bosch and Peter Paul Rubens:• Peter Beagle, The Garden of Earthly Delights (Viking, 1982)• Julius Held and Donald Posner, 17th and 18th Century Art (Prentice Hall, 1972)40

Les deux corps de !'artiste
An interview with Lee Bui

Kim Seung-duk (KS):The most salient aspect of your more recent sculptural
practice is the exploration of ideas and man ifestations of the "monstrous." Can you
talk about how this fits into the overall concerns of your artistic production?
Lee Bui (LB): As you know, I was trained in art school at a time when the dominantmodes in Korean sculpture were either abstract-minimal or figurative-realist. Despite
the apparent opposition between the two, both were, in my view, dead languages
that closed off the possibility of saying anything new. Also, there was the constraint
on form imposed by materials like stone and steel-materials that were connected
to dubious notions of permanence and invulnerab ility.
Of course, when I first turned to "unconventional" materials like fabric, foamrubber, and sequins, I wasn't trying to make a conscious break with tradition somuch as trying to see what I could do with stuff that was near at hand. And thisultimately freed me up to experiment with organic and sometimes phantasmic
forms, imaginary morphologies emerging from my private perceptions andexperiences and perhaps memories and dreams.
In the beginn ing, everyone in Korea dismissed these works. It wasn't art, theysaid. Then later, when discourses of gender and the body became fashionable, they
were eager to place my work into those convenient categories. But ultimately thiswasn't instructive, either, because these categories became orthodoxies in their own
way, whereas the "monstrous" aspect of my work has always been about exceeding
prescribed boundaries and touching upon the uncategorizable, the uncanny.
KS: One of the central, recurrent themes in science fiction is the shifting borderline
between the organic and the technological. How do you see your work in relation
to this issue?
LB:The tension between biology and technology touches upon a range of thornyquestions that have been with us since time immemor ial, long before theemergence of an industrial or technological civilization. For me, it's essentially acontinuing inquiry into the schizophrenia between our faith in progress andperfectibility, and our secret dread of exceeding our "natural" boundaries. In thissense, you could say the myths of Prometheus and Icarus were early examples ofscience fiction.
I'm exploring a similar territory with my cyborg and monster sculptures. For me,
the cyborg, as a visual trope and conceptual metaphor, is deeply ambivalent. And
the monster is its dark doppelganger. Yes, I'm aware of Donna Haraway's theories,
which unfortunate ly seem to have been co-opted by the spectacle of the capitalist
techno-sublime. There's a forced triumphalism to this whole phenomenon, as if todeliberately repress any suspicion of potential failure or disaster.
It might be useful here to recall Paracelsus,the 16th-century Swiss physician andalchemist, who claimed to have created a "homuncu lus," a little man, from a
mixture of human semen and blood. This homunculus, according to Paracelsus,
grew up with a sweet temperament until it acquired inte llect and knowledge, atwhich point it turned destructive and self-destructive. In short, it became a"monster." And the word "monster," we should keep in mind, is derived from theLatin "monstrum," meaning portent, a dark hint of what's to come.
KS: Let's for a moment backtrack and talk about your beginnings, which included
performances that were socially conscious, addressing issues surrounding theconstruction of femininity.
LB: My f irst performances were a natural extension of my sculptural concerns and41

incorporated some of th e soft-sculptura l fo rms that I had been work ing on. These
were made of fa bric and foam rubber, and sprouted appendages resembling
tentacles or extra limbs. But they were hollow inside, flexible, and relatively light, sothey could be worn. In performance, they acquired the elements of motion,contingency, and immediacy. The human body within could not be viewed inisolation from this second, artificial, and somewhat monstrous body on the outside.
In this blurring of distinction, I could convey something of the sense of mutability,instability, and even vulnerability in our experience of the body.
Initially, I was drawn to performance because I found it, in some ways, anoppositiona l practice that defied categorization. Of course, it's now thorough ly
institutionalized. I'm not so sure, though, that when I began these performances I
had a def inite activist agenda in mind. As a young artist, I was more concerned withf inding ways to give expression to what I thought were largely personal perceptions
and experiences of th e wor ld around me. But the fact that I was a woman doing
this in pub lic gave it a political dimension. And that I was dealing with aspects of
it controverthe body, my body-which, of course, happens to be feminine-madesial, and even confrontational, for many people.
KS: In your cyborgs, there are identifiable, gendered features, partial breasts and soon. But in your more recent series of monster sculptures like Amaryllis (pp.54,62)
and Siren (pp.55,60), these feminine anatomical traits seem to have become
subsumed in insect-like morpho logies. Is this an attempt to touch upon post-genderissues?
LB: The feminine forms of the cyborgs are a symptom of th e ways in which,throughout modern history, the seduction and the threat of bew ildering
technological advances have been sublimated into more controllable, morerecognizable manifestations. Of course, the elements of menace and instability arestill there, underneath the layers of intricate repression. Think of the female robot inFritz Lang's Metropolis, one of the earliest examples of the modern cyborg: it's amasculine fantasy and projection which attempts to negotiate, however uneasily,
the fear of the all-consuming mother and the will to discipline and harness thisforce. An evolution of this idea is prevalent also in the Japanese anime and manga,from which most of our current morphologies of the cyborg are derived.
I don't know if I could characterize my more recent monstrous forms as anattempt to enter th e realm of the "post-gender." Unfortunately, I'm not fami liar
enough with this terminology to say much about it in relation to my work. But what
I've done is essentially to push the logic of the masculine fantasy of the cyborg to its
darkest extremes, to the point of convulsion, a shattering that ironically gives rise toproliferating, extravagant, auto-productive forms.
SK: In terms of visuality, there is a sort of post-human, post-anthropomorphic
quality to these monsters. Does it allow these works to be considered in the context
of figurative sculpture 7
LB: By "post-human" or "pos t -anthropomorphic," I assume you're ta lking about
the relations hip of th ese works to the human figure. Of course, consciously orsubconsciously, the form and structure of our body is an inescapable point ofreference in any representation. Whether alluded to, denied, distorted, or even
abstracted, it 's always there-like a specter.
Even when we conceive of the divine, it tends to take on a human semblance.
This is the only way we know how to grasp the unknowable. We are essentiallynarcissistic that way. And so it only makes sense that when we delve into our42darkest fears and anxieties, they also tend to become manifested in form s that arepredicated, however tenuously, on the human. Think of the figure s in Bosch. Or
even further back, the fantastic creatures of the medieval bestiary, a very early
expression of our impulse to project elements of the human even onto an imaginary
natural w orld .
In this sense, the " post-human " has always existed alongside the human as its
doppelganger . It's nothing new. Of course, we now live in an age that is supposedly
rationalist and technological. So today, our bestiary is filled with the fantasies andnightmares of biomechanical couplings, the fusion of flesh and polymer s, but this
too ultimately refers back to our preoccupations w ith the body we inhabit. Insofar as
figurative sculpture is understood as a sustained exploration of such preoccupations,
I guess you could consider my work in that context. But strictly as an art-historicalcategory or genre, it doesn't interest me.

Editor'sNote:· Kim Seung-duk is a critic and curator based in Paris.
• This interview was first published, in its longer, original version, in artpress No.279 (May 2002), Paris.

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Installation view of Cyborgsand Monsters at Artsonie Center, Seoul, 1998.