Modernity has always been obsessed with the sky—with towering spires, silver airships, and the audacious promise of human mastery over the natural world. Yet, every monument contains the shadow of its own ruin. South Korean artist Lee Bul (b. 1964, Yeongju) has spent decades probing this fragile threshold were utopian ambition fractures into impermanence.
Lee Bul lives and works in Seoul, South Korea. Having graduated from Seoul’s Hongik University with a BFA in sculpture, she made early breakthroughs to create multi-faceted, provocative works that crossed genres and disciplines exploring themes of beauty, corruption, and decay. Some of Lee’s now-iconic works from this period were considered integral in the emergence of a global contemporary art of the 1990s, as advocated by supporters of her work, influential curators including Harald Szeemann, Hans Ulrich Obrist, and Okwui Enwezor. Lee’s ‘Majestic Splendor’ (1997), an installation featuring decomposing fish adorned with sequins that was shown at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, was selected by Szeemann for his Venice Art Biennale exhibition in 1999, ‘dAPERTutto’. The same year, her karaoke installation ‘Gravity Greater Than Velocity I, II’ (1999) and ‘Amateurs’ (1999), featured in the Korean national pavilion and she received honorable mentions for both projects.
Lee continued to examine the body’s relationship to technology during the early 2000s creating sculptural hybrids of machine and organic forms. Her Cyborgs and Anagrams series explored our fascination and anxieties surrounding the techno-utopian ideal of perfectibility; while recalling the mutable, extracorporeal soft sculptures she created for her early performances.
Organized by guest curator Dr. Jiyoon Lee, The Anatomy of Every Setting Sun marks Lee Bul’s inaugural solo exhibition with Hauser & Wirth at their West Chelsea space in New York. Arriving just ahead of her major traveling survey, Lee Bul: From 1998 to Now, opening November 13 at the Museum of Contemporary Art Antwerp, this presentation brings her interrogation of technology, history, and the human body into arresting clarity.
The Weight of Air: Monument and Ruin Levitating in Chelsea
Levitating within the ground-floor gallery, Willing to Be Vulnerable—Metalized Balloon (2015–2016/2020) immediately commands the space. Fabricated from silver PET film, the massive zeppelin-like airship hovers between majestic spectacle and ghostly relic.
The zeppelin occupies a unique place in the collective memory: once the crowning symbol of early 20th-century progress, it became a tragic emblem of catastrophic failure in an instant. By capturing this silver titan in a state of suspended animation, Lee Bul transforms industrial hubris into a quiet, haunting meditation on human vulnerability.
120 x 120 x 4.6 cm
Phantasmagorical Surfaces: Mother-of-Pearl Meets Silk Velvet
Beyond her monumental installations, the exhibition highlights Lee’s painterly evolution across two masterly series that blur the line between organic growth and synthetic construction.
In her ongoing Untitled (Willing to Be Vulnerable—Velvet) paintings, Lee spends months—and often years—building complex visual stratigraphies.
The Radiance of Perdu
Her recent works in the Perdu series push the boundaries between relief painting and sculpture. Through a rigorous cycle of embedding mother-of-pearl into acrylic paint, followed by relentless sanding, Lee reveals radiant, shifting topographies beneath the surface. While earlier Perdu creations evoked biomorphic, hybrid organisms, these latest iterations move toward abstract, utopian cityscapes.
Monuments of the Future-Past
The exhibition culminates in a group of new large-scale sculptures that build upon her acclaimed 2024 commission, Long Tail Halo, created for the Fifth Avenue façade of The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Fusing mechanical elements with biological textures and architectural forms, these hybrid structures critique the aggressive monuments through which empires project power.
At once futuristic and fragmented, Lee Bul’s structures exist in a perpetual state of becoming—neither fully born nor completely destroyed. In The Anatomy of Every Setting Sun, she reminds us that humanity’s grandest dreams of the future are always inherently unfinished, glowing brightly even as they collapse into twilight.