Lee Bul: cyborgs and karaoke: a traveling exhibition now at the New Museum in New York, highlights the recent karaoke-based work of a Korean artist known for her high-tech feminism and "global" fusions of culture

Art in America, May, 2002 by Frank Hoffmann

Curated by Clara Kim, assistant director of exhibitions at SFAI, "Live Forever, Act One" featured a trilogy of karaoke video installations: Amateurs (1999), Anthem (2000) and Live Forever (2001). Also included were many of Lee's preparatory drawings, sketches and computer renderings related to her sing-along projects. Playfully mimicking spaceship designs in Japanese manga, a full-scale Styrofoam model of a "karaoke pod" (a capsule designed to contain a single semi-reclining participant, later realized in three fiberglass versions for the other venues) was placed in the center of the video-installation area. Although visitors seemed intrigued, few took this androgynous object, with its girlish pink color and formal references to male genitalia, for what it is--at least until they saw Lee's project sketches in the gallery upstairs. Clearly, it is hard to experience unfinished work in the center of a show as anything other than that: unfinished work. The Art Institute's policy of commissioning "experimental and experiential" art for its Projects in Process exhibitions thus allowed the piece, set among videos of relative technical perfection, to look like a rush job.

The show, as its press materials emphasized, extended Lee's "investigation of the body in a technologically mediated society." The earliest karaoke video, Amateurs, previously shown at the BAWAG Foundation in Vienna, depicts several young girls in black-and-white school uniforms aimlessly dancing and hopping around in a forest as the camera movements echo their actions. Kim says the characters are to be seen as Korean schoolgirls. But since public schools in South Korea abandoned uniforms in 1983, considering them a vestige of Japanese colonialism, these shots seem rather to allude to voyeuristic fantasies found in Japanese blue movies and Japanimation, which often manifest a perverse fascination with "innocent schoolgirls."

Anthem, a car journey on a six-lane freeway through a city at night, filmed in rapid motion at close proximity to street level, drew much attention when it was first shown at the Shanghai Biennale in 2000. But the SFAI show's main attraction was the Live Forever video, projected on a large screen in the main exhibition hall. During her residency at the Art Institute, Lee filmed this piece, with student assistants, in the tropical-themed Tonga Room of San Francisco's historic Fairmont Hotel. While a group of mostly middle-aged couples dance to the hotel lounge band, the audio is controlled by the visitors to Lee's show, who are invited to select the accompanying music and, of course, to sing along to the chosen popular song whose lyrics appear karaoke-fashion on the screen. Audio and video do not mesh, making the experience much more disjunctive and much less emotional than it would be in an actual commercial karaoke setting. The two older installations function according to the same principle, with similar visual effects. As in Amateurs, the Live Forever footage was shot from changing perspectives; however, this time the camera was moved mechanically--like an in-store security camera, only faster--creating a sense of disorientation through rapid, unexpected shifts.