Beasts from the East

One area of life in which globalism certainly rules is that of contemporary art. Installation, performance, the doctrine of Marcel Duchamp, conceptualism — nowadays these flourish throughout the world and nowhere more so than in the Far East.

Plenty of evidence for this is on view in an exhibition at the Hayward Gallery by the South Korean artist Lee Bul. But though the idioms are familiar, the works themselves can seem outlandish to an occidental eye.

Just inside the door you are confronted by a sculpture entitled ‘Monster: Pink’ (2011). It looks like one of those oddly shaped vegetables that are sometimes displayed at village fêtes — but running riot on a monumental scale and sprouting innumerable carrot-like tubers.

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Lee Bul is good at making monstrosities. More dangle from the ceiling of the Hayward and thrust up from the floor — part human, part plant. Sometimes, from a mass of tendrils, a hand or a limb protrudes. Another type, dubbed ‘Cyborgs’, has apparently been fashioned from suits of sheet armour tailored for the female figure with sharply conical breast-plates and no heads. A third variety suggests that interbreeding has taken place between lobsters and machine tools.

These fantastic blends of the animate and inanimate are fun and, in a way that is reassuring for the historically minded, traditional. They fit into an oriental genre; it’s not hard to imagine them in the animated films of the Studio Ghibli, replete with magnificently weird flying machines and phantasmagorical Japanese goblins. For that matter, 18th-century Japanese painting abounds in bizarre bugaboos, and sometimes giant vegetables too.

But modernism is an oriental tradition too. The reverse of the proposition with which I began — that Western modernism has conquered the rest of the world — is that cutting-edge 19th- and 20th-century European art borrowed heavily from Africa and Asia.