Few contemporary artists have mapped the psychological terrain of modernity as astutely as Lee Bul. For nearly four decades, the South Korean artist has interrogated the fragile architectures—both physical and ideological—that shape our world. Now, the Leeum Museum of Art in Seoul presents Lee Bul: From 1998 to Now, a sweeping retrospective encompassing almost thirty years of her practice. It is not merely an exhibition, but an encounter with the mind of an artist who has long navigated the delicate boundary between utopia and disillusionment.

The show gathers around 150 works, ranging from her early sculptural and performance experiments to her monumental mirrored installations. Yet, rather than unfolding chronologically, it meanders like a dreamscape—an “unpredictable landscape” that refuses linear storytelling. Visitors pass through metallic airships, glass labyrinths, and topographical ruins, moving between temporal and emotional dimensions as if through the corridors of a fractured memory.

Between Flesh and Machine

Lee Bul’s debut in the late 1980s was marked by visceral performances that mirrored South Korea’s turbulent political landscape. Over time, her work evolved into a meditation on duality—the porous thresholds between human and machine, civilization and nature, idealism and decay.

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, she began to construct large-scale sculptures and installations that reimagined modernist dreams through a dystopian lens. Her art evokes the ambition of Le Corbusier’s urban utopias and the shimmering despair of science fiction. Gleaming surfaces conceal existential fractures; chrome and resin stand in for skin, steel becomes bone.

Mon grand récit: The Collapse of the Grand Narrative

At the heart of the exhibition lies Mon grand récit, a body of work Lee has been developing since 2005. The series takes its title from Jean-François Lyotard’s concept of the “grand récit”—the overarching stories societies tell themselves to make sense of progress, truth, and civilization. Lee dismantles these narratives, reassembling them as architectural fragments of failed utopias.

Her topographical installations are vast and intricate: twisted towers, collapsing bridges, and illuminated pathways that flicker like dying stars. They evoke the melancholic beauty of a world forever chasing perfection but condemned to imperfection. Drawing on utopian literature, Romantic landscape painting, and Korea’s own modern history, Lee’s work situates the viewer within a physical and philosophical ruin—a sublime theater of contradiction.

Reflections Without End

Among the exhibition’s standouts is Civitas Solis II, a mirrored installation that multiplies reflections into infinity. The viewer, engulfed by their own image, becomes part of the work’s recursive system. It is both dazzling and disorienting—a metaphor for selfhood in the digital age, where identity fragments across endless surfaces.

A playful counterpoint arrives in Lee’s karaoke installation, where humor meets critique. Here, communal performance replaces the solitary gaze, echoing the artist’s early interest in participation and bodily experience.

My environments of glass and mirrored surfaces transform spectators into participants. The scale, precision, and play of reflection create a powerful sense of wonder.

– Observed Eugene Kim, editor-in-chief of My Modern Met, after visiting the exhibition.

Indeed, within Leeum’s architectural landscape—alongside Olafur Eliasson’s Gravity Stairs and Kimsooja’s to Breathe–Leeum—Lee Bul’s works feel like living organisms, breathing and reflecting the anxieties of the present.

The Art of Utopia’s Remains

To walk through Lee Bul: From 1998 to Now is to move through the anatomy of modern aspiration—its radiant promises and its ruins. The exhibition’s nonlinear structure mirrors the cyclical nature of human ambition: the endless rebuilding after collapse, the yearning for transcendence even amid decay.

Lee’s oeuvre is not about despair but about persistence. Her mirrored airships and gleaming debris remind us that even failed utopias leave traces of beauty. They are ruins illuminated not by nostalgia, but by the light of introspection.

As the exhibition continues at Leeum Museum of Art through January 4, 2026, it offers an experience at once cerebral and visceral—a meditation on power, desire, and the fragile machinery of hope.