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“It’s stunning,” said Christina Carvalho, a 43-year-old accountant from Oakland, Calif., as she stood on the ship’s Royal Promenade, gaping up at “The Pearl,” a gigantic kinetic art installation.

Kinetic art has long been something of a niche field, ripe for innovation, and you could link Lee to one of its pioneers, the risk-taking Jean Tinguely, particularly his deathly late work.

Venezuela, in particular, was a hotbed of geometric and kinetic art.

Paradoxically, the government both brutally suppressed dissent and, with an eye to international stature, avidly supported aspects of progressive culture, welcoming young artists like Alejandro Otero and Jesús Rafael Soto as they returned home from Paris, bringing the latest developments in abstract geometric and kinetic art with them.

But by the end of the decade, she’s producing abstract metal pieces that reflect her attention to avant-garde work around her, in this case kinetic art — by then a Venezuelan national style — meaning art incorporating an element of physical or optical motion.