“Oh, I have another story!” the artist Lee Bul said, laughing, during a recent interview. “Always with the stories, always with the drama.”
Over the past year, as she created four enigmatic sculptures that will soon grace the facade niches of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in Manhattan, she fell ill several times, she told me. “I joked that it’s some kind of sinbyeong,” a case of a god possessing a potential shaman in Korean tradition. And then, last week, “I got bitten by a giant centipede.” She was at her home on a mountain in Seoul, and the sensation on her left heel was “like being pierced by a nail.”
“It feels like a hint or a prophecy,” Lee told me on the video call, aided by an interpreter. “It’s telling me to keep the mood up.” It was early August, and she had been in her studio, just outside the capital city, six days a week, to finish the pieces in time for their Sept. 12 unveiling in New York. “This pain heals the pain of sculpting,” she said of the bite.
It was classic Lee Bul: wry and candid, but also slyly ambiguous, and marked by a fierce determination. She has created radical performances, intricate sculptures and installations about outmoded visions of the future, and in recent years, poetic abstract paintings. Now 60, she has long been one of South Korea’s most revered artists.
For “Long Tail Halo,” the fifth iteration of the Met’s high-profile Facade Commission, Lee has pushed ideas from her shape-shifting career into fertile but fraught new terrain, using figurative and abstract elements to construct a quartet of uncanny beings that are unlike anything offered in previous editions of the series. These sculptures allude to the Met’s collection while questioning how art should look and behave in the public realm.
Bul, who has bright white hair, was speaking from her cavernous studio, wearing an apron lined with pens over a buttoned-up black shirt. Studio assistants — she had 10 to 15 throughout the Met project — moved about behind her, making minute tweaks to the sculptures. Almost 10 feet tall, they have complex skeletons with dense webs of perforated stainless-steel strips, resembling outré Erector sets, and they would be finished with angular polycarbonate and acrylic components or acetate-sheet skins.
One clear source for Lee’s Met pieces are “Cyborg” sculptures that she began producing in the late 1990s with materials like silicone and polyurethane, and which made her a star on a global art circuit that was just coming together. These human-machine hybrids are usually white, malformed and fragmented, like sci-fi characters melded with ancient Mediterranean statuary. Limbs and heads are missing, but their curves indicate they are female. They suggest mistranslated fantasies, and yet they are not unalluring. They harbor desires.
When Lee started in the late 1980s, she used her own body in ways that still shock. Naked, she hung from a Seoul theater’s ceiling with rope and discussed her experience with abortion, then illegal in South Korea. She stripped outside a museum and swung a pickax at a chain affixed to a collar around her neck. She wandered city streets in a many-tentacled costume. She figured, “I have nothing to lose,” she said. “I was very ambitious. I felt like I could change the world.”
After years of authoritarianism, South Korea was transitioning to democracy. In June 1987, citizens had flooded into the streets, demanding “direct presidential elections and the restoration of civil liberties,” said Joan Kee, an expert on Korean contemporary art who is the director of New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts.
“In many ways, one has to think about Lee Bul’s work as an assertion of those civil liberties.” Kee added that it was also “a real rejection against this incredibly entrenched patriarchal system.” (Today, South Korea has the worst gender pay gap among O.E.C.D. countries.)
Lee stopped performing after about 10 years. “I didn’t have the energy anymore,” she said. Also, viewers were coming for a spectacle. They wanted “more strength, more shock.”
Planning the commission, Lee thought about how a facade like the Met’s is typically a place for guardians. She trawled through its vast holdings and saw so many such figures that “I lost my sense,” she said. While sketching, she wondered, “What is a guardian? What does that mean for humans?”
Two of her resulting works are recognizably humanoid. They each have a torso and legs, but they are abstracted, splintered, as if cobbled together from broken shards with wanton disregard for accuracy. In renderings, they bring to mind the Met’s Cubist masterpieces, Greco-Roman classics and armor holdings.
“It looks like a character from mythology, but then it also looks like contemporary sculpture,” Lee said, mentioning Nike, the Greek goddess of victory. “It’s not just one style or of one period. I tried to make it look — even though there are many layers of time and meaning — like it has one style.”
The other two are canine-like, and at least as abstract. Built from what appear to be thin, sharp planes, each creature hunches over, vomiting an avalanche of the same bits that compose the work. Three Jindo dogs that Lee had years ago was an inspiration. One ate grass when he had stomach troubles, to help him regurgitate. “He would always sit in front of me, in front of my window, sitting and waiting and looking at the city,” she said. “It was somehow very magical.”
For the Met’s director, Max Hollein, who initiated the annual facade commission, Lee’s display “projects a certain fluidity, anxiety, non-definition.” It has a classical appearance, he said, “but you have a feeling it changes while you look at it.”
When the commission’s curator, Lesley Ma, toured Lee through the museum two years ago, they visited Umberto Boccioni’s 1913 Futurist figure striding through space, whose dynamic surfaces are echoed in Lee’s new works. They also stopped by a show of paintings by Louise Bourgeois, the French American renowned for her unflinching and sometimes-surreal portrayals of women’s bodies, which carry an emotional charge that connects with Lee’s art. “I have many mothers,” Ma recalls Lee telling her, “and she is one.”
Lee’s actual mother was a political dissident; her father was, too. “My father wanted to be a writer, but he failed,” Lee said. “My mother wanted to be a dancer, but she failed. They both had to give it up for reality.” They died a few years ago.
Because of their activism, Lee’s parents had difficulty finding work, and the family moved regularly. Her mother sewed beads onto bags and knitted clothes at home. At one point, she was sent to jail. It was “a very difficult situation,” Lee told me, “but at the time, I didn’t have anything to compare it to.” Believing that she would also have employment issues, because of her family history, she headed to art school, where she learned to handle stone and metal.
A devotion to the handmade, to everyday craft, defines Lee’s practice. For a piece called “Majestic Splendor” that she presented in a two-person show at the Museum of Modern Art in 1997, she ornamented dead fish with sequins and displayed them on its white walls in plastic bags. It was a portrayal of decaying beauty that hearkened to the cheap, handmade objects that Korean women, including her mother, had earned their living by making, and to the fish drying in local markets. A refrigeration unit held still more fish. Soon after the show went on view, the museum removed the unit, saying it was not functioning properly and that the work’s odor had spread to other spaces and its restaurant. It did not notify Lee first, and she pulled the rest of her work in response. “Their handling of the situation was very arbitrary and coercive,” she said.
“I guess you could say,” she told the curator Hans Ulrich Obrist a year later, “that the white cube structure of the supreme modernist institution couldn’t contain, in more ways than one, the disturbances set off by my work.”
(MoMA did not comment beyond saying its archive did not conflict with this account.)
Kee, the director of the I.F.A., said “Majestic Splendor” “can provoke racialized assumptions” when exhibited outside of Korea. “Complaints about smell or the look of an object can foreground entrenched attitudes toward race and gender.” She sees it as a forerunner of the artist Anicka Yi’s 2017 exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum, which included a scent piece with chemical compounds derived from Asian American women’s bodies. Yi, 53, was born in Seoul, grew up in the United States, and said in an email to The New York Times that “Lee’s mastery is in the way she incorporates restraint and refinement with the intimate and abject.”
The storied curator Harald Szeemann managed to catch the MoMA work and tapped Lee for the 1997 Lyon Biennale (where “Majestic Splendor” was shown without incident) and the 1999 Venice Biennale, where she also represented South Korea. She has since been widely collected by international museums, and in 2018 had a survey at the Hayward Gallery in London. Another, next year at the Leeum Museum in Seoul, will travel to M+, the art museum in Hong Kong.
But while many U.S. institutions hold Lee’s work, the Met commission is her first museum show in the country since a 2001-2002 touring exhibition that stopped at New York’s New Museum. “We’ve tried, trust me, I’ve tried,” one of her dealers, Rachel Lehmann, said, by phone. “The American institutions, they’re late.”
Lee’s feeling about showing again at a New York museum? “I like it, but I almost forgot how I felt,” she said. “It was a very long time ago.” She laughed about the American belief that “New York is the center of contemporary art. Too proud!”
What does she want people to feel in front of her Met pieces? “I hope they feel a number of mixed emotions, including the feeling that they’re close to understanding the work but also a slight feeling of nausea,” she said.
This sounded unsettling, different from what one might expect a guardian (or a goddess or man’s best friend) to impart. Lee explained her thinking more, but only up to a point. “I’d like the works to come off as somehow familiar at first, accessible,” she said. “But I also want to convey a hint of something a bit strange or uncomfortable that makes the viewer dwell on why that is.”
These sculptures may be guardians, but they are not quite fully present. They are furtive, ominous. They are also fantastical, particularly those spewing canines, with elaborate interiors. Drawing on thousands of years of art history and deeply personal experiences, they appear unresolved, imperfect, elusive — statues for our times. Even for the artist, I suspected, they remain somehow unknowable, like the connection between a pet and its owner. Or the ultimate power of art.
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