LEE BUL: [Korean] I always knew I had to address modernity, such as utopian ideas. It’s about the dreams that humanity had through the modernist ideals as we pass through modern life.

Back when I was dealing with these themes, ideas like artificial intelligence, humanoids, or cyborgs were mostly in the realm of imagination for most people.

Probably due to my background, I have a deep interest in power structures and how they operate. Both of my parents were political dissidents. In those days, Korea had a ‘guilt by association’ system. To engage in any kind of economic activity under this system, we had no choice but to move frequently. It was a form of state power—censorship. The police visited our home often, around once a month. They checked up on what books and magazines we read, what new things we did, and who we met. I couldn’t simply get a job and make a living either. I realised the only way to be free was to become an artist.

My focus was on how such ideas [utopian dreams and power structures] managed to survive and still operate throughout this long span of human history. It leads us beyond the present or technological landscape, allowing us to look perhaps into our past or even deeper, as if we’re searching for our origins. It seems to have created that sort of narrative.

If what I’m interested in is revealing power structures, ultimately I thought it couldn’t be just one field, just one subject, or one material—not just the physical realm, but the landscape including time, the landscape of modernity. It starts from a small idea, a word, or it could start from a book, a film, as I start exploring deeper. There are other references that connect these thoughts.

DORYUN CHONG: [Korean] You incorporate these references from literary works and theoretical texts into your work.

LEE BUL: [Korean] I bring fragments of words from different references, trying to contain the original mood while finding a different rhythm. This is what I find interesting. When I was working on this, there was a book I read that was very impressive: J.G. Ballard’s ‘The Crystal World’. It’s a novel containing content about everything becoming crystallised in a certain region. In the case of ‘The Crystal World’, you could say it was a metaphor for ideals. So if you look here, there are many elements that constitute modernity.

It all began in the early 2000s with the series ‘Mon grand récit’. Cities and architecture are part of the landscape. These days, we don’t just say ‘city’, we say ‘landscape’. It’s expanded into the term ‘landscape urbanism’, and cities are the same.

It feels like thoughts, visions, and memories from different times are all giving off light at the same time, like they’re exploding. In a way, what I try to show in my work isn’t someone else’s city, but my city, my landscape. I pick certain points or buildings from the past—whether they actually existed, were imagined, planned but never realised, or still planned knowing it can never be realised. My aim was to create an imaginary landscape as a way of reading our times.

[English] For a long time, nothing changed. But suddenly today, everything is changing.

[Korean] I think that we haven’t been able to deviate even an inch from what we call the fate of modern humanity. The moment we think it’s solved, without changing one bit, it comes before us again. It’s a story without a beginning or an end, a story where you can start anywhere, enter from anywhere, and it will still connect.