Lee Bul’s 'Ein Hungerkünstler' – Lucy Hawthorne

I’m repulsed.

After circling the lone object in the centre of the room, I experience a sudden wave of nausea. Claustrophobic, I rush out of the room, eyes only for the door.

Deep breaths. Desperately trying to make sense of this strange incident and unaccountable physical reaction. I’ve always felt that viewing a sculpture is akin to a journey – a commitment of time, wandering around or amongst three-dimensional objects, eyes following the changing form, legs and body bending and stretching to view from all positions every bump, intimate crevice and texture. I reflect on this journey…

I enter the room in full rapture. The stunning object, although small relative to the expansive room, fills the space. It’s so dazzlingly powerful that only it matters. I’m bewitched. Unlike the other sculptures in the building in their cold shades of black and white (can I call it a she?) she is the familiar shade of warm flesh.

Legs spread apart, her hair glistening seductively in the light… I’m under the influence of a powerful attraction, a sickening temptation because this attraction is completely wrong. It’s becoming clearer that I’ve been misled. This form is not of flesh and blood.

My stomach pulls. I feel the cascade of gems spill from my gut - the hair of a beast gone wrong.

Later, after recovering amongst the photographs upstairs, I make my way (cautiously, curiously) back to view the artwork that caused me such pain and confusion. I edge towards the room, eyes diverted with the equivalent fear of meeting the gaze of a basilisk.

***

Exactly three years later. I’m sitting in my living room, flipping through the MCA’s Lee Bul catalogue and there she is. Shrunk to a mere seven centimetres in height on the page. I’ll describe her for you…

She’s almost one meter in height, with a width of two meters and hair that stretches out to five meters in length. The materials used to produce Ein Hungerkünstler (2004) include aluminium and stainless steel, polyurethane, epoxy and acrylic paint – hardly the sexiest materials. Like many of Lee Bul’s sculptures, Ein Hungerkünstler resembles a cyborg, with sections of odd shaped plastic assembled to create a tripod of three ‘legs’, which end abruptly where the abdomen might be. In the absence of a torso (or perhaps more of a concern, the absence of a head), the eye follows the long crystal and glass beaded strands flowing, escaping, from her hips. I don’t believe she is blind – in fleeing the gallery three years ago, it was surely underneath her watchful eye. Perhaps the crystals that adorn her hair allow her to see?

I feel uncomfortable looking at her image on the page. I no longer feel sick. I can ponder the reasons why I felt so threatened, so defenceless. She is now the one who is vulnerable, unable to meet my gaze, her power sadly restricted by her two-dimensionality. The catalogue is very slick, with glossy embossing, and coated with a substance that make the pages stick together. As a result, her lustrous surface has been absorbed by the shiny pages and is now partially obscured by my sweaty thumbprint.

I long to meet her again, tell her that no artwork has had such a strong physical or psychological affect since. The strange form that continues to live only in my mind, which captured my devotion, yet caused me to retch, and who made me realise the extent to which an artwork can never be captured on a catalogue page.