Lee Bul’s Enigmatic Sculptures for the Metropolitan Museum of Art

“Oh, I have another story!” the renowned artist Lee Bul exclaimed with a laugh during a recent interview. “Always with the stories, always with the drama.” Over the past year, as she meticulously crafted four enigmatic sculptures destined to grace the facade niches of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in Manhattan, she experienced several bouts of illness, she recounted. “I joked that it’s some kind of sinbyeong,” referring to a case of a god possessing a potential shaman in Korean tradition. And then, just last week, “I got bitten by a giant centipede.” She was at her home on a mountain in Seoul when the sensation on her left heel felt “like being pierced by a nail.”
“It feels like a hint or a prophecy,” Lee conveyed via a video call, with the assistance of an interpreter. “It’s telling me to keep the mood up.” It was early August, and she had been working tirelessly in her studio just outside Seoul, dedicating six days a week to finishing the pieces in time for their unveiling on September 12 in New York. “This pain heals the pain of sculpting,” she remarked about the bite.
This statement epitomized Lee Bul: wry and candid, yet also slyly ambiguous, underscored by an unyielding determination. Over the years, she has created radical performances, intricate sculptures, and installations that explore outmoded visions of the future. In recent years, she has also ventured into poetic abstract paintings. Now at 60, she remains 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 the boundaries of her shape-shifting career into fertile but fraught new terrain. Using a blend of figurative and abstract elements, she has constructed a quartet of uncanny beings, unlike anything presented in previous editions of the series. These sculptures not only allude to the Met’s collection but also challenge conventional notions of how art should appear and function in the public realm.
Sporting bright white hair, Lee Bul spoke from her cavernous studio, dressed in an apron lined with pens over a buttoned-up black shirt. Studio assistants — she had 10 to 15 throughout the Met project — bustled behind her, making minute adjustments to the sculptures. Almost 10 feet tall, these pieces feature complex skeletons composed of dense webs of perforated stainless-steel strips, resembling avant-garde Erector sets. They are completed with angular polycarbonate and acrylic components or acetate-sheet skins. (Sigorta Haber)