In the Studio: Lee Bul

 

It’s a long way up the side of Bukhan mountain to Lee Bul’s studio, on the northern outskirts of Seoul. It’s not the tallest mountain in the area, more of a hill, but it rises steeply above the city, overlooking the presidential palace at its base. The air is crisp and clear here, and three huskies jump out of the yard into the driveway as my car pulls up to a humble two-story house with a gray cement brutalist façade. The 44-year-old Lee, best known for her porcelain cyborgs and silicone monsters, lives here with her husband, James. It seems far too small to hold a studio that can accommodate her grand designs and high-tech inventions.

Yet on the ground floor, in two adjoining rooms that serve as an office, Lee maintains her “think tank,” where she designs, plans and fabricates most of her sci-fi-inspired sculptures. Diminutive yet self-assured, she is the antithesis of a diva, dressed in a sweater and trousers in muted grays, her eyes owl-like behind thick-rimmed glasses that mask her gentle expression. Occasionally, her husband, a Korean American writer and critic, steps in to help with translation. Through it all she maintains a sense of humor, laughing when words fail.

Lee first came to international attention in the late 1990s for her “monsters”: half machine, half Venus de Milo meditations on the female form of the future. She also created “karaoke pods,” gleaming capsules in which visitors could sit and sing written-out lyrics to piped-in music with no audience or outside interference. These early works explored the body, both representing it and using it as a metaphor for the fallibility of technology. Their striking power led to Lee’s being included in major exhibitions worldwide, from “Au-delà du spectacle,” at the Centre Pompidou in 2000, to “Global Feminisms,” at the Brooklyn Museum in 2007.     

Although she uses a freestanding shed for larger pieces and rents a warehouse space in downtown Seoul, it’s in the quiet of her mountaintop house that Lee conceives her ideas about the collision of beauty and technology. It’s also here that she, with a handful of assistants, develops these ideas into material forms that look as if they’d been produced in a special-effects studio.

The house offers spectacular views of the city below, a panorama reminiscent of Blade Runner, especially at night, when Seoul turns on its neon lights. It is easy to see the influence of this landscape in Lee’s latest series, “Mon grand récit” (“My Great Tale”), begun in 2005 and featured in her show this past winter at the Cartier Foundation in Paris. That exhibition included 12 pieces: six of them combinations of crystals and metal chains on metal armatures that hung like surreal chandeliers, and six resin sculptures stationed on the floor, like mammoth molten rock formations, reflecting the gleaming surfaces of the light-filled Jean Nouvel architecture. These works, simultaneously delicate and imposing, were inspired by the utopian plans of 20th-century visionary artists and architects and were presented as fragile ruins of a long-gone modernity.

When I visited her studio, that exhibition was still on, but Lee was already planning her next New York solo gallery show, which opened May 8 and runs through June 14 at Lehmann Maupin. It features two works from the Cartier exhibit—Bunker (M. Bakhtin), a huge black fiberglass boulder that visitors can enter, and a piece from Lee’s “After Bruno Taut” series, a sort of inverted chandelier with a filigree of chains and crystals—as well as three new sculptures from the “Infinity” series, dioramalike landscapes embedded in mirrored vitrines. Her office had  pen-and-ink drawings pinned to its walls and Styrofoam models on every ledge, including a miniature of Bunker in foamy blue and an Erector Set version of one of her largest works, Aubade, an aluminum structure with led lights that rose more than 13 feet at the Cartier Foundation.