It was an exceptionally sunny day for this time of the year. We escaped from the oppressive heat by visiting Lee Bul’s exhibition at the Hayward Gallery, where the dark works of art hung in contrast to the bright sunny day we had just left.

When you enter Lee Bul’s exhibition, the first thing that stares back at you is a huge, multilimbed, gloopy and fleshy monster (Monster: Pink), so tactile that I wanted to reach out and touch it, but sadly it stands cordoned off. I must not be the only one who wants to! It’s not alone - suspended from the ceilings are more of its kind and a legion of pure white cyborgs (Cyborg W1-W4, 1998). Further away in the corner stands a silver and black monster on a landscape of shattered mirrors and blinking lights (Civitas Solis II, 2014). These fabric works were created with ‘stuff that was closer to hand’, including fabric, foam and even sequins. These soft, fleshy forms, sprouting fragile internal organs and additional limbs, convey the instability and vulnerability of our bodily experience. The room was quite well lit, and I didn’t notice until I saw my photographs on a bigger screen the very broken reflections the light bulbs had cast all along the walls and ceilings nearby. It was only then that could I really appreciate the subtlety and intensity of Lee Bul’s works.

Some parts of the gallery felt empty, whilst other parts were consumed by larger pieces of work. Lee Bul grew up under a tyrannical and authoritarian regime in South Korea, and many of her works show how the pursuit of perfection or idealism in the body, politics or aesthetics could lead to failure or disaster. The result has been a body of work that appears obsessed with cybernetics, architecture, the body and human enhancement, but is unable to shake the heavy, dark clouds of history.

There were quite a few pieces that I was drawn to, bringing back memories of my own personal interest in the concepts of cyborgs and posthumanism. Like the theorist Donna Haraway, who wrote the essay ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’, Lee Bul was interested in what cyborgs could tell us about our relationship to technology and the cultural attitudes towards the female body. In this age, with our dependence of technology, many people have already become cyborgs, whether they like it or not. I like the juxtaposition of some of her futuristic cyborg designs with their porcelain material. Untitled (2000) shows off body parts of a cyborg. Another piece which I liked was Titan (2013), who looked like a lost faun in human form, with hooves for feet and antlers on top of its head made of shards of glass and metal. In other photos that I’ve seen, both of his antlers appear attached, but in this exhibition one was detached, hung from the wall behind him.

Another work that I was drawn to was the piece titled, Heaven and Earth (2007), an enormous tiled bath, filled with black ink, with the tiles cracked and surrounded by frosty white peaks. This piece was drawn from another traumatic event in Korea’s history, where a student protestor, Park Jong -chul, was tortured and killed in a bathtub in 1987. Even without knowing the full story behind this piece, the dark waters gave me chills of something evil, and a sense that no good could have come from this. A work of torture and death, as a country fell apart hidden behind walls and the silencing of protest, it’s truly horrifying.

There are many architectural models littered throughout the space, and even tiny models of her larger scale pieces held in bell jars. Crystals everywhere, robotic human figures, shards of metal, a mirrored maze that leads to a room of infinite reflections. I liked the idea that all things have multiple narratives, and that you shouldn’t just take things on face value. Everything has the potential to be this or that, hard or soft, real or fake, violent or gentle. Take the beautiful and colossal Zeppelin, Willing To Be Vulnerable - Metalized Balloon (2015-2016), suspended over a mirrored floor, waiting to explode in viewers’ faces. Once seen as a symbol of progression and modernity, the popularity of these futuristic vehicles came to an abrupt end in 1937, when an airship carrying 96 passengers burst into flames as it tried to land. It is surprising how many people put their faith in new technology but fail to see or understand the results if technology fails.

This exhibition coincides with the Hayward Gallery’s 50th anniversary, and Lee Bul had also created an installation that covered the entire Brutalist building. Compared to her other works inside the building this was so subtle that I only noticed it when I had left the building and caught the sun as I walked across the bridge towards Waterloo. Lee Bul has definitely lit the Hayward Gallery inside and out for this momentous occasion

If you haven’t seen the exhibition yet, then I do urge you to, as its truly a thought-provoking, worthwhile exhibition that is currently in its last week at the Hayward Gallery, running until 19 August.

If you can’t go then this short video, created by the Southbank Centre, provides an overview of the exhibition curated by Stephanie Rosenthal.