Lot 383: LEE BUL

LEE BUL B.1964 AUTOPOIESIS executed in 2007 crystal, glass beads on nickel chrome and stainless steel wire 170(h) by 196 by 85 cm.; 66 7/8 by 77 1/8 by 33 1/2 in. (dimensions variable)

Paris, Fondation Cartier pour l'art contemporain, Lee Bul: On Every New Shadow, 16 November 2007 - 27 January 2008, illustrated in colour

A delicate affair of coloured crystal beads and aluminium wire, the piece Autopoiesis hangs midair, resembling a tentacled underwater creature.



Much of the artist's sculptural work makes significant references to modern and contemporary architecture – especially the glass palaces and towns in the midst of clouds by the Utopian visionary architect Bruno Taut – yet at the same time is also affected by a variety of other influences: "... it's not about presenting a single, fixed story. It can start anywhere at any point, and there is no beginning or end, only the cyclical, internal permutation of fragments. The most salient allegorical elements are architectural because utopian aspirations often surface in architectural forms. But I've mixed in other fragments as well; some are fictions, others, private memories and imaginings. And I've tried to avoid imposing a temporal structure as an ordering device on these elements. They must in some sense become loosed from historical time and collide with each other."[1]



It is perhaps this explanation which best deciphers the inspiration behind the current work. The term autopoiesis was originally conceived as an attempt to characterize the nature of living systems. It is the process whereby an organization produces itself; literally, self-production - not to be confused with allopoiesis, which is the process whereby an organization produces something other than itself. An example of the former is a biological cell or a living organism; the latter is exemplified by an assembly line.



The term was originally introduced by Chilean biologists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela in 1973:



"An autopoietic machine is a machine organized (defined as a unity) as a network of processes of production (transformation and destruction) of components which: (i) through their interactions and transformations continuously regenerate and realize the network of processes (relations) that produced them; and (ii) constitute it (the machine) as a concrete unity in space in which they (the components) exist by specifying the topological domain of its realization as such a network." [2]



Through using such fragile components as crystal and glass beads in the structure of Autopoiesis (2006), Lee Bul's work simulates the complex interwoven structure of an organization or society – themselves networks of myriad individual delicate entities and tenuous conditions: each reliant on the others for their very existence... or extinction.




[1] Exh. Cat., Lee Bul: On Every New Shadow, Fondation Cartier pour l'art contemporain, Paris, 16 November 2007 – 27 January 2008, p. 21.

[2] Maturana, Varela, 1980, p. 78.