Seoul — A silver airship hovers above the atrium of Leeum Museum of Art, stretching seventeen meters from end to end. It glitters with metallic skin, evoking both the grandeur and the failure of early twentieth-century Zeppelins. This monumental work, Willing To Be Vulnerable – Metalized Balloon, sets the tone for a survey that is less about nostalgia than about confronting the volatile horizons of the future.

The exhibition, titled Lee Bul: Since 1998, gathers more than 150 works created over the last three decades. Although the artist has been a commanding presence at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Venice Biennale, and other international institutions, Seoul has rarely had the chance to encounter her oeuvre at this scale. Co-organized with Hong Kong’s M+, the show positions Lee not as a fixed icon but as an artist in constant negotiation with history, technology, and the body.

“I don’t want to be defined,” Lee remarked during a press conference on September 1. “I was never the point. The work came out of interests, out of the lives around me, and out of the social context. How people interpret it is their own matter.” Her rejection of the labels that have long pursued her—“warrior woman,” “feminist artist”—was explicit. Instead, she asked the audience to step into the unstable narratives shaped by site, time, and collective experience.

The survey’s architecture makes that instability palpable. The Black Box chamber immerses visitors in City of the Sun II, a labyrinth of mirrored walls and floors. Figures fracture into reflections, strangers’ silhouettes overlap with machines, and one’s body becomes scattered debris in a hall of illusions. Within this darkness, Lee has strategically inserted earlier milestones: Cyborg W6, Untitled (Anagram Leather #11 T.O.T.), the karaoke-style installation Gravity Greater Than Velocity I from the 1999 Venice Biennale, and Aubade, which reimagines modernist architecture’s utopian ambitions. “Like the last white scene in 2001: A Space Odyssey, I wanted this space to suspend time,” Lee explained. “The past never disappears; it always returns as the present.”

Descending into the basement, the spectacle becomes harsher. Steel frames, chandeliers, pools of black liquid, and flickering neon lights clash in a landscape that could be either a ruin or a construction site. The atmosphere resists the polished image familiar from her international exhibitions; here, unease is deliberately foregrounded. The curator describes it as “a landscape of allegory,” where Russian Constructivism, Bruno Taut’s visionary drawings, Romantic painting, Korean modern history, and utopian literature collide like overlapping blueprints of memory.

The exhibition also traces Lee’s turn to painting. From the 2010s, series such as Perdu and Untitled (Willing To Be Vulnerable – Velvet) condensed her vocabulary of disappearance and fragility into layered abstract surfaces of mother-of-pearl and acrylic. These works read as miniature universes, contracting the scale of her installations into shimmering fragments of light.

For all its density, the exhibition is less retrospective than forward-looking. It coincides with a broader institutional recognition of Lee’s global stature. Thames & Hudson is preparing her first comprehensive monograph in English, Korean, and Chinese, with a French edition to follow. In 2026, the exhibition travels to M+ in Hong Kong, cementing her position in the international canon. Few Korean artists have received such treatment.

The artist’s biography offers clues to the urgency of her vision. Born Lee Bul (李昢, meaning “dawn’s light”) in the mountains between Yeongju and Yeongwol, she grew up in a household marked by political dissent. Entering Hongik University’s sculpture department, she launched her career in the late 1980s with body-based performances and soft sculptures that challenged authoritarian structures. The notorious Majestic Splendor (1997), a display of sequined rotting fish shown at MoMA, brought her international attention. Two years later, she represented Korea at the Venice Biennale and won a Special Prize with her karaoke-room installation.

Over subsequent decades, her practice expanded into cyborg assemblages and sprawling architectural fictions such as Mon grand récit, interrogating the seductions and failures of modernity. More recently she has pushed painting into dialogue with sculpture, architecture, and technology. Her works are housed in the world’s foremost collections, from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Guggenheim, and Tate Modern to the British Museum, LACMA, and M+.

Accolades have followed: the Ho-Am Art Prize in 2019, the French Order of Arts and Letters (Officer) in 2016, the Root Baumgart Award in 2023, and an honorary doctorate from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2022. In 2024, she became the first Asian artist commissioned for the Metropolitan Museum’s façade project in New York. This year, she joined Hauser & Wirth, aligning herself with one of the world’s most powerful galleries.

Leeum’s exhibition offers audiences a rare opportunity to enter this restless imagination. The galleries unfold like a brain exposed—unfinished diagrams layered with visions of collapse and rebirth. At moments, the atmosphere is spectacular; at others, almost suffocating. Yet the ambition is unmistakable: to show how art can simultaneously inhabit ruins and utopias, memory and speculation.

Educational programs accompany the exhibition. On September 27, Lee herself will speak about her major works since 1998 in an artist talk, followed by a curator’s talk in October. These events promise to deepen the encounter with an oeuvre that refuses to settle into singular narratives.

For Lee Bul, what matters is not whether she is viewed as a warrior, an icon, or even a pioneer. What matters is that each visitor steps into the unstable terrain she has drawn, and discovers there an experience that is never fixed, always unfolding.

Sayart / Maria Kim sayart2022@gmail.com