Lee Bul The Four Mysterious Guardians of the Artist

By Andrew Russeth

“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.