We live in the age of the splintered self. Never before have we been afforded so much agency to decide who we want to be, and to become it. And never before have we been so distracted and dissociated, so far removed from ourselves.
That’s because we’ve been banalized, terrorized, and stupefied by the technologies we’ve invented under the mushroom cloud of late capitalism. We’ve become deficient, confused cyborgs drowning in the sewers of information, dopamine junkies wandering through the dark and lonely alleys of the real, searching for the short-lived gratification of scroll culture.
Consequently, we’ve become leaky vessels of our own existence. We call some of this progress, but look at us: We’re a mess.
So how does contemporary art respond to all of this? In the majestic façade niches of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art rests a quartet of new sculptures by Lee Bul, a South Korean artist who seems profoundly aware of this fractured human condition.
Unveiled on September 12, Lee’s Long Tail Halo (2024) series is The Met’s fifth façade commission, this time renamed after the automaker Genesis (a luxury brand of South Korea’s Hyundai), which is sponsoring the project for the next five years.
From Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue, you can see two anthropomorphic statues flanking the museum’s entrance: One painted black and the other simulating the color of patinated metal or old stone splotched with lichen. Both are patently Cubist in style, which at first seems an odd choice in 2024. The latter in particular, “Long Tail Halo: CTCS #2” looks like someone kidnapped a medieval suit of armor from The Met and abandoned it at Pablo Picasso’s doorstep.
This is not my imagination running wild. During a talk on the night of the unveiling, Lee named several works from The Met’s collection — including some by Picasso, Umberto Boccioni, Fernand Léger; and yes, the armor — as influences on her carbon fiber and thermoplastic sculptures. But if Cubism was a reflection of the disjointed self after the Industrial Revolution, it’s updated and contemporized here to respond to today’s mind-boggling advances in artificial intelligence, 3D printing, and other technologies.
Spilling out from the two other niches are translucent bags containing hundreds of geometric prisms resembling crystals, or mirror shards. Lee has made extensive use of mirrors and prisms in past installations like the ambitious Bells from the Deep and Via Negativa II (both 2014). Here, it’s tempting to think of them as reflections of the museum’s riches, or the spoils of colonialism, or again, the fragmented modern psyche.
But to me, those cascading bags, titled “The Secret Sharer I and II,” also evoke Lee’s early days of radical performance: suspending herself half-naked in the air in a work about her abortion experience, or crawling on all fours on the streets of Seoul in multi-headed monster suits with fetus appendages, freaking out unsuspecting pedestrians. The point is, this is an artist who’s not afraid to let it all hang out. Born to political dissidents who were constantly on the run and unable to settle in one place, she’s also an artist who has had to pick up the pieces of her life more than once.
Despite their ultra-modern, lightweight materials, the two figures stationed at the entrance look like they’ve always lived at the museum, Frankensteined in the bowels of its ethnographic collections. I couldn’t help but think of Walter Benjamin’s idea of a tormented Angel of History, evoked by Paul Klee’s 1920 “Angelus Novus.” Here, however, the angel’s face is turned toward the future, not just the past.
If they could speak, what would Lee’s angels of history tell us? Who knows. But one thing is for sure: They’re as mystifying and full of contradictions as the course of humanity itself. They’re at once hideous and beautiful, hateful and loving, tragic and hopeful. They know nothing we don’t already know about ourselves, but maybe they are capable of reminding Met visitors and passersby of a fundamental truth about humankind: As messed up as we are, we never stop moving forward.
Lee Bul: Long Tail Halo continues at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (1000 Fifth Avenue, Upper East Side, Manhattan) through May 27, 2025. The exhibition was curated by Lesley Ma.
