“I don’t know when I started,” Lee admits when asked how long it took to prepare for her current shows.  Her creative process involves extensive reading and research, blueprints and model making before she even decides to begin on a work. “I start to sketch or just write about my ideas and put them up all over my wall in my studio, and every day I watch this grow into a map of ideas until one day I think, ‘Maybe I can make this more concrete and specific,’ ” she says.

“Mon grand récit” is something of a departure for Lee, comprising otherworldly landscapes based on failed or unrealized 20th-century utopias that she studied. She first took up this idea in 2005, during a residency in New Zealand in which she became fascinated by that country’s history and quirky mythology. Since then she has also drawn inspiration from a wide range of modernist projects, including the Russian Constructivist Vladimir Tatlin’s unexecuted tower, Monument to the Third International, and Alpine Architektur, the German architect Bruno Taut’s plans, designed during World War I, for glittering cities in a world at peace. 

Lee’s projects have always been built on a foundation of theoretical writing. Her bookshelf is lined with English and Korean texts on utopias, notably Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, with its magical accounts of fictional lands. Lee recalls her confusion when she participated once in a panel discussion and an audience member asked how she knew so much about Western culture. She replied, “I never knew this was only yours.” Lee now explains it this way: “I grew up studying this field, so I never think about this as ‘Western’ history or ‘Western’ culture.”

Lee is mainly self-taught in these matters, having gotten her only degree, a BFA in sculpture, from the highly conservative Hongik University, in Seoul. She was born in 1964 in a remote village where her dissident parents were hiding from the South Korean military government. The prejudice against her parents influenced both her career choice and her career path: Art school was one of the few options available to a child of dissidents, and her slow acceptance in the Korean art world was partially due to the insecure position of her parents in the country’s society.

After graduating from Hongik, 1987, she circumvented South Korea’s stubbornly conventional art world by creating public performance art, producing fantastic costumes with multiple protruding limbs and wearing them into arenas such as the airport and downtown shopping districts. These controversial works gained her international recognition. In 1997 Barbara London, a curator at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, invited her to create a project space there. Lee submitted Majestic Splendor, a towering vitrine filled with funereal lilies and sequin-covered dead fish. The walls of the gallery were lined with more fish, perfumed and vacuum-packed in plastic bags. The stench that nonetheless resulted was part of the point of the piece, highlighting our unease with nature’s messier side, and the work was removed after only a few days because of complaints from the museum staff.

In 1998, Lee was a finalist for the Guggenheim Museum’s prestigious Hugo Boss prize, and a year later she received an honorable mention for Majestic Splendor when it was included in Harald Szeemann’s “Aperto” exhibition for young artists at the 48th Venice Biennale. She was also one of two artists shown in the Korean pavilion at that Biennale.

By then, Lee was well-known for pieces such as Cyborg Red, 1997, and Cyborg Blue, 1997, silicone casts of archetypal female figures from classical art reconstructed with machinelike parts. These sculptures were often interpreted as feminist critiques of face and body enhancements. “Once they started to call my work these things, nobody tried to look at it another way,” Lee says. With her karaoke pods, featured at Venice and in her 2002 solo show at the New Museum, the public came to understand that her artistic concerns are more universal, including how  everyone interacts with technology.