Opening reception and book launch: Saturday, March 29, 6 – 9pm
Closing performance: Wednesday, April 9, 7:30pm

BUL is a multi-media installation of Christine Yerie Lee’s experimental rock opera BUL (2023) and its newly completed sequel SWAN SONG (2025). This ongoing project is inspired by both the Korean folktale of the Bulgasari, an iron-eating monster who liberates the oppressed by devouring the weapons of the corrupt, and the North Korean film Pulgasari (1985), a Godzilla-esque work that was directed by South Korean Shin Sang-Ok while being held captive by North Korean leader Kim Jong Il. BUL reimagines the ancient monster and forms an untimely meditation on ancestry, kinship, and what the future owes the past.

Written in five acts, BUL (2023) reimagines the monster as an orphan named BUL who finds herself in the throes of love in the City of Angels. Through pastiches of 20th century cultural forms such as the pop song, black box theater, and music videos, BUL shapeshifts through different dimensions to survive the changing times. The project includes personal memoir, collaborative scores, choreography inspired by communist political gestures, and an original soundtrack. Lyrics were crowdsourced from Lee’s community then stitched into a collective sonic love history by LA-based band muff.

While BUL is built upon the harmonic melodies and lyricism of pop songs, SWAN SONG gear-shifts into dissonance and glitches as modality. Conceived as an instrumental opera and visualized as a silent film, SWAN SONG depicts an intergenerational encounter between a now world-weary BUL and her estranged human great-great-great-granddaughter, CY at the Salton Sea in Imperial County, California. Their transmission is expressed in a “monster language” composed of ancient and contemporary instrumentation and movement choreography. BUL’s voice is expressed through the saenghwang, an ancient Korean free reed mouth organ said to echo a phoenix’s cry, while CY is voiced by the harmonica, an instrument that descends from the saenghwang. The soundscape merges the Korean folk tradition of pansori (musical storytelling) and the American blues, and evokes an imaginative ancestral lineage and dialogue between past, present and future.

The final act features five performers enacting shifting poetics of relations by using the languages of synchronized animal movements (starling murmurations, ant death circles, locust swarms), pop culture (the wave, line dancing), traditional Korean dance, and also choreography that references and abstracts geopolitical borders between the U.S., Russia, China, North Korea, and South Korea. If BUL focuses on the ecstasies and tragedies of the relationship between self and other, SWAN SONG complicates the desire to belong to something greater than oneself by asking: Where do the self and the collective body begin and end? Who defines a border? How do we become borderless?

The opening reception will also host the book launch of BUL (2025) published with FRIEND EDITIONS (New York). The exhibition closes with the open-mic event “Bulgasari LA” with permission from original event founder Lee Han-joo. Bulgasari events began in Seoul in 2003 and are an ongoing showcase of experimental music, avant-garde art collaborations, and improvisational performances.

The project was funded in part by the College Art Association’s Visual Arts Fellowship, multiple grants from the California Institute of the Arts, and the Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Grant. BUL is organized by Ajani Brannum.