Maquette for Mon grand récit

Mon grand récit is the first series of work that Lee Bul started when her attention shifted from a focus on the body to architecture, landscape, and the history of modernity, in 2005. The title, which translates as “My grand narrative”, is meant to ironise Jean-François Lyotard’s pronouncement about the impossibility of “grand narratives” in our age. By adding the personal pronoun mon, the artist says she wanted to express “the necessity of devising stories — albeit subjective, imperfect, and incomplete ones — that can serve as consolation in the absence of grand narratives”. From the series, on view are selected drawings, including an anti-cartographic “map” of the artist’s childhood hometown that she drew by tracing and converging her disconnected memories of the village. Also presented is Maquette for Mon grand récit (2005), the very first sculptural production in the series, which features a landscape drenched in pastel-coloured epoxy and littered with icons and tropes from modernist architecture and utopian/dystopian fiction. By juxtaposing disparate materials and jumbling references to utopian modernism, Lee Bul conveys a melancholic and complex relationship between reality and fantasy, beauty and tragedy, and eutopia and dystopia.