Monuments to architectural fantasy

Lee Bul's Mon grand recit: because everything owes more to science fiction than rolling countryside.

Last week's opening of the 2005 Taranaki Festival of the Arts should prove the region is rapidly gaining a reputation as a vibrant cultural destination.

It would be simplistic to describe New Plymouth as having had a renaissance that can be dated BC and AC (before and after Cruise), but the standard of the local cuisine went up a notch a few years ago to service the sophisticated tastes of film crews working on the Cruise vehicle, The Last Samurai.

Another coup was the successful launch of the Taranaki-based Womad. By then, Len Lye's contentious Wind Wand, now accepted as a local icon, was finally working and became a centrepiece for the redeveloped waterfront, which is now home to the impressive Puke Ariki Museum.

Meanwhile, the Govett Brewster Art Gallery has been quietly punching above its weight since 1970, staging ambitious contemporary exhibitions that rival the galleries of bigger cities here and abroad.

Coinciding with the festival, the Govett Brewster is showing one of its most ambitious projects, a selection of work by high-profile Korean artist Lee Bul that includes Mon grand recit: because everything, the first in a new series of works developed especially for the Govett Brewster.

"She had to do some research about the local area, because the idea for this new body of work started by conversing with Greg [Burke, the Govett's director] about gardens and landscapes," says Emma Son, who works for Bul's Seoul Gallery and is helping to translate for her.

"Rather than focusing solely on the New Zealand landscape, she wanted to expand that idea of the landscape into a more generic one. She wanted to link these ideas about space and area that are generally known knowledge and juxtapose that in her work."

Adds Bul, "We can explain about the work with New Zealand elements from here and also without the New Zealand references."

Although Mon grand recit: because everything features a sublime landscape of waterfalls and snowy, mountainous peaks, it bears more resemblance to the fantasy scenes of science fiction than the vistas made famous by The Lord of the Rings.

It is layered with references that include pop culture, architecture, classical literature and painting, all suggesting ideals, fantasy, and perhaps failure.

Piled at one end is a jumble of crumbling modernist buildings, while precariously placed near the waterfall tumbling from the other end is a model of Vladimir Tatlin's Monument to the Third International, a structure that was meant to be the Soviet response to the Eiffel Tower but was never built.

Following her exquisitely constructed cyborg sculptures and futuristic karaoke booths, the science fiction of Western cinema and Asian anime or manga cartoons are a clear influence.

Although Bul is not a big science fiction fan, she is interested in aspects of the genre, particularly vintage films such as Metropolis. "That film is interesting for me because it features fragments of our history and vision that I am exploring in similar territories," she says.

"The tension between biology and technology, which is a central concern of modern science fiction, touches on a range of thorny questions that have been with us since time immemorial, long before the emergence of what we would call an industrial or technological civilisation.

"It is an inquiry into the schizophrenia between our faith in progress and perfectibility and our secret dread of exceeding our 'natural' boundaries. You could say the myths of Prometheus and Icarus were early examples of science fiction."

A game of spot-the-building would keep architectural enthusiasts busy for hours. As well as references to the Crystal Palace and architect Frank Gehry, many of the structures are taken from the fascist cultures of early-20th century Russia and Italy.

"They are a little bit different but I want to put them all together because fascist architects really want to make monuments but always monuments have this sad history," she says.

Another work from this series connects Korea to this history of idealistic reforms by including a building from Bul's history. "It is an anonymous concrete building, best described as a bastard of Bauhaus and Eastern Bloc, and typical of the architecture of rapidly built-up urban Korea of the 1970s," says Bul.

By constructing a tribute to mostly unrealised projects she has created a poetic monument, not to architecture but to architectural fantasy. This is both an internal utopia and a junkyard for dreams.

As a landscape work that represents imagination, it has a close association with her earlier explorations of the body and bodily extensions.

"She always wants to touch on the bigger sense, even with the cyborgs and the karaoke in Live Forever," translates Son. "Because this new body of work passes a lot of different fragments from the historical concepts and ideas. In that way it shows more the bigger sense of what she has been dealing with in the past."* Lee Bul's exhibition is at Govett Brewster Art Gallery, New Plymouth, to Sep 18