For Lee, the overriding theme that connects these earlier works with her more recent landscapes is the issue of perfectibility: the human craving to create or pursue an ideal that often fails or, worse, produces monstrous results—cosmetic surgery, industrialization or fascist governments. “My work has always been a representation of a desire to transcend limitations,” she explains. “So the transition has been to move from the body to the broader idea of social structures.”

When asked if her concept of unsuccessful utopias is rooted in the recent history of South Korea or, more pointedly, the model of Communist North Korea, only 35 miles away, Lee responds that although Korean history may appear to be different from the West’s in its details, the challenges of globalization and technology are essentially the same everywhere. But one piece in the Cartier Foundation show, Heaven and Earth, does refer specifically to the famous volcanic lake atop Mount Beakdu, on the North Korean–Chinese border, a site South Koreans aren’t allowed to visit. Lee presents it as a gleaming bathtub ringed by mountain peaks and filled with a noxious black fluid that gives off a foul smell.

“Lee Bul’s work is like a dream being transformed from one reality into something else. We don’t know whether it belongs to a world of today or a world of tomorrow,” says the artist’s American dealer, Rachel Lehmann, of Lehmann Maupin (Lee is represented by Thaddeus Ropac in Paris and pkm Gallery in Seoul). Despite the fact that, according to Lehmann, there is a long waiting list for Lee’s pieces, prices remain fairly reasonable for an artist of her stature, from $20,000 to $90,000 for works in her current solo show. “Collectors connect emotionally with this work,” says the dealer. “They see an individual language, they see an original beauty, but they also see the quality of the craftsmanship, and they are moved.”

Lee’s manual methods might be surprising, given the high-tech gloss of so much of her art. Her female cyborgs look as if they were produced with cad software, which generates three-dimensional forms. But there is no computer in her office. Instead, Lee works out most of the shapes by hand before sending the molds to a fabricator to produce the synthetic limbs in silicone or porcelain. Her approach to the utopian landscapes is even more hands-on. For the monumental inverted chandelier of After Bruno Taut, she and five assistants assembled the complex metal frame and then applied thousands of lengths of chain and crystals. Only the most daunting works, such as the life-size resin Bunker, are made outside the studio.

The detailed handiwork is most evident in the pieces of “Mon grand récit,” such as Sternbau No. 5: a small mobile draped with hundreds of tiny chains and ropes of crystals that was featured in the Lehmann Maupin booth at New York’s Armory Show in March. In Lee’s studio there’s a small worktable where spools of chains are arranged by size and hue. Another artist might outsource such labor-intensive production, but Lee finds that she must supervise every step of a work’s evolution and is unsatisfied with results reached in a more routine fashion.

For her, scientific and philosophical inquiry must be joined to painstaking techniques in a way that harks back to some of art’s greatest achievements. “I remember when I was six or seven years old,” she says, “I read a book about Leonardo da Vinci, and I thought that to be an artist would be like that, to challenge everything and make it look great.”

"In the Studio: Lee Bul" originally appeared in the June 2008 issue of Art+Auction. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Art+Auction's June 2008 Table of Contents.