n.paradoxa Vol. 14 5 In her celebrated essay, ‘A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century’, Donna Haraway dismissed the notion of an essential unity that founds the “natural” matrix of woman. According to her, ‘there is nothing about being “female” that naturally binds women [together].’ ‘The myth called “us”,’ she argues, is only skin-deep, a mask that covers the contradictory social realities of patriarchy, colonialism, and capitalism. 1 Accordingly, we can think that phrases such as “women of color” or “Asian women” similarly bear the burdens of political, historical and cultural complexities. When we see the notion of a united sisterhood called “woman” as an illusion, we can also confront the fictions of “Asian women” that have captured the imagination of many Westerners: on the one hand, that of the demure, yet sexually charged geisha, goddess, and on the other hand, that of the submissive, yet threatening cyborg. During the past decade, the new discourses of feminism called “third wave” have acknowledged poly-vocal possibilities, embracing eclectic, and often contradictory differences in race, class, and sexuality. Different from the first and second waves which strived for women’s suffrage and equal rights or the ‘reconstruction or elimination of sex roles’ 2 , third wave’s engagement with sexuality and identity as a ‘tactical subjectivity’ 3 allegedly opened up a From Goddess to Cyborg: Mariko Mori and Lee Bul Jieun Rhee new interface between the boundaries and borders of diverse social realities. But in reality, the authors of the third wave feminism publish mainly in Western languages and they are often criticized for the apparent academicism aloof from the social and political reality of non-Western countries. Haraway suggested that ‘women of color’ might be interpreted ‘as a cyborg identity, a potent subjectivity synthesized from fusions of outsider identities and in the complex political-historical layerings of her “biomythography”.’ She concluded her essay with the famous quote, ‘I would rather be a cyborg than a goddess’ and by endorsing the figure of the cyborg’s post-gender, post- racial possibilities. 4 How, then, might her notion of cyborg be interpreted in a contemporary Asian context? What kinds of possibilities – or problems – in particular, develop in the dual roles of goddess and cyborg as they appear in contemporary Asian art? With these questions in mind, this article attempts to read the works of two contemporary Asian women artists, Japanese artist Mariko Mori and Korean artist Lee Bul against Haraway’s cyborg manifesto. These artists are both leading figures in the Asian contemporary art scene, who have employed and investigated images of both the goddess and the cyborg as icons of Asian femininity in their art.