(GOBI) Christine Yerie Lee: Staring at the Sun on view until December 7, 2025
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GOBI is pleased to present Staring at the Sun, multidisciplinary artist Christine Yerie Lee’s solo exhibition encompassing drawings and paintings created as part of Lee’s multimedia opera BUL불. This ongoing project spans video, performance, costume, and drawing, inspired by the Korea folktale of the Bulgasari – a metal-eating monster who liberates the oppressed by devouring the weapons of the corrupt – and the North Korean film Pulgasari (1985), a Godzilla-esque work directed by South Korean filmmaker Shin Sang-Ok, while held captive by Kim Jong Il.
Bulgasari in Korean means “cannot be killed but can be killed by fire” and “starfish.” In the lore, the monster is described as having a bear’s body, elephant’s nose, tiger’s feet, bull’s tail, and rhinoceros eyes; it also serves as a protective talisman against fires, nightmares, and plagues. Lee embodies this monster to investigate her own family’s history of migration, while writing her own narrative. In BUL불, meaning “fire,” the Bulgasari symbolizes an ancestral presence within the voids of her own personal history, challenging Western perceptions of monstrosity and contamination into platforms for transformative encounters and collaborations. The interwoven histories of the folktale and the real-life story of the film reflects the complicated relationships between legibility, migration, nationhood, and authenticity.
While the overarching project BUL불 functions as a Bulgasari itself – the sum of many collaborative parts and mediums – the works in Staring at the Sun function as expanded film sets that explore how gestures and symbols in images and popular media operate to shape our notions of desire, love, and freedom. Using montage, Lee remixes film stills with archival references through drawing, printmaking, and collage. Her charcoal drawings – which her 8-year-old niece calls “drawings made from ash” – and mixed-media compositions echo mid-century kaiju posters and religious iconography, including interpretations of the monster as Mary Star of the Sea. She draws figures individually, then cuts, rearranges, and collages them onto canvas – a form of both override and redaction – interweaving her characters into multiple apocalypses, evoking moments of ecstasy, confusion, romance, and friendship amid the end of times, signaling a new era. From the ashes, love still rises.
Christine Yerie Lee is a multidisciplinary artist working in video, drawing, and performance. Raised in the American South, Lee’s practice considers the performativity of identity construction and often uses the body to resist dominant power structures by generating imaginative narratives for alternative futures. Drawing from East Asian and American folklore, global political histories, and pop culture, her work addresses personal and collective memory, hybridity, and authenticity. Through intersectional inquiry and worldbuilding, she aims to illuminate the distinct and parallel threads of the human experience to provide pathways for connection.
bul·ga·sa·ri
noun
plural: bulgasaris
1. 불가사리 (“bulgasari”)
Hangul, Korean characters: sea star, starfish, asteroid
2. 不可殺伊 (“bulgasari”)
Hanja, Chinese characters: cannot be killed
3. 火可殺伊 (“hwagasari”)
mix of both languages: can be killed by fire
4. CULTURE
a. Legend of Bulgasari: “In the final years of Songdo lived a monster that ate up all the metal scraps, and people could not kill it. They named the monster ‘Bulgasal’ (Impossible-to-Kill). The narrative can be read as a foretelling of the fall of a dynasty and the birth of a new one (Goryeo, 913-1392) …” –- Encyclopedia of Korean Folk Culture.
b. Bulgasari at the End of Songdo / 松都末年의 불가사리 (1962): a lost South Korean kaiju film directed by Kim Myeong-je.
c. Pulgasari (1985): a North Korean dark fantasy-action kaiju film directed by South Korean Director Shin Sang-ok while he and his wife Choi Eun-Hee were held captive by North Korean leader and notorious cinephile Kim Jong Il. The Japanese actor Kenpachiro Satsuma, known for his role as Godzilla, played the monster Pulgasari. The film’s success led to Shin and his wife’s escape.
d. Galgameth (1996): an American fantasy children’s film directed by Sean McNmara and loosely based on Shin Sang-ok’s Pulgasari (1985), who is credited as the writer by his pseudonym Simon Sheen.
5. RELIGION
Mary Star of the Sea or Stella Maris (Latin): In the European Christian tradition, starfish are also known as the “sea star” or “Mary Star of the Sea”. A sign of hope and used to wish safe passage for those who travel by sea.
