Lee Bul

Lee Bul (Korean: 이불; 李昢; born 1964) is a South Korean artist who works in various mediums, including performance, sculpture, installation, architecture, and media art. As curators such as Stephanie Rosenthal and art historians such as Yeon Shim Chung have observed, Lee Bul's artwork is shaped by both her social-political context and her personal experiences. Her works have engaged topics related to architecture, technology, gender, history, and memory. Lee lives and works in Seoul.

Biography Lee Bul was born on January 24, 1964, in Yeongju, Gyeongsangbuk-do, South Korea. Raised by politically active parents while her country was under the rule of Park Chung Hee, as a child Lee witnessed a dramatically changing society from its margins, where she and her family repeatedly uprooted and relocated. The art historian Yeon Shim Chung has argued that Lee's artistic trajectory diverged at an early stage from the oft-travelled artistic routes of her time. from Hongik University, Seoul in 1987, receiving her artistic training at a time when Minjung Misul—literally “People's Art”—was posing a challenge to the dominance of academic art and minimalism. As curator Mami Kataoka writes, “With the country as a whole agonizing over what form their new society should take, it is not difficult to imagine Lee Bul wrestling with all manner of ideas [...] about the form society should take, doubts about and rejection of the military dictatorship, ideas about the reality of the social system, and the uncertain future.” Her work received its first widespread international recognition with the series Majestic Splendor (1991), which was exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in 1997 and Harald Szeemann’s Lyon Biennale the following year.

Practice

Early work and performance Lee Bul's work of the late 1980s and early 1990s used performance to explore the relationship between the body and society in South Korea at that time. In search of a way to express her state of being on the one hand, and the state of society on the other, she created forcefully visceral works and guerrilla-like actions, a number of which critically explored gender politics and the patriarchal order in Korean society. Her early performances combined aspects of craft with the contingencies of circumstance and time.

Sorry for Suffering—You think I'm a puppy on a picnic? The performance work Sorry for Suffering was carried out over the course of 12 consecutive days in 1990. Lee roamed through public spaces in the multi-limbed soft sculpture, enacting performative interventions at sites such as airport gates, shrines, university campuses, and imperial palaces. The art historian Ayoung Kim describes the work as "an attempt to expand the borders of artistic practice by escaping the traditional ways in which sculptures have occupied space, as well as by infusing theatrical elements into her work, such as satire, symbolism, and temporality.” Exploring an extremely taboo subject in South Korea, the structure of Lee's performance “obscures the distinction between the private and the public, the personal and the political, the real and the contrived.” The artwork includes performers engaging in slow improvised movements, amplified by concealed microphones highlighting their labored breathing. The installation features real dead fish decorated with sequins, beads, and other small, sparkly items, which are placed in plastic bags and pinned to the wall of the gallery in a grid pattern. Over time, the work emits a putrid odor. In 1997, during the Projects exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Majestic Splendor was removed from the exhibition due to its stench. As the art historian Yeon Shim Chung notes, Majestic Splendor operates on multiple levels, simultaneously “implicating the individual body and the politics of Korean society.” Fish are a popular motif in both religious and secular Korean art traditions. In Majestic Splendor, Lee incorporates the sea bream, known as domi in Korean, which is associated with a renowned Korean folktale. According to the tale, the legendary heroine committed suicide to protect her virtue, rather than succumb to the advances of a lecherous king. While a monument is typically made to withstand the test of time, Lee's monument is soft, vulnerable, and ephemeral.

As the art historian Michaël Amy writes, “Lee aptly examines the exotic, oriental ideal as she believes it to be construed by the Western male—his initial desire to be seduced quickly replaced by the urge to conquer and possess.”

Cyborg/Anagram In the mid-1990s, Lee Bul began her Cyborg series, moving away from performance-led works and returning to primarily three-dimensional sculpture. as a monster can only be considered monstrous in relation to something that embodies the notion of perfectibility like the cyborg. This series of biomorphic sculptures and drawings depict hybrid forms that are part machine, plant, and animal. The Anagram series takes its name from the English term for changing the order of letters in a word to make a new word, an operation that parallels the cyborgs’ reconfiguration of body parts. Through her Cyborg, and Anagram works, Lee Bul investigates the instability of human identity, the allure and dread of technological advancement, and the continuous quest for perfection beyond natural limitations. In Lee's practice, cyborgs and monsters function as powerfully ambivalent metaphors; “ciphers of resistance against the traditional limitations of gender, feminism, race, science and politics.”

Live Forever Live Forever is a multimedia installation first exhibited in 2001. The work features futuristic spaceship-like karaoke capsules that, according to Wenny Teo, evoke the streamlined aesthetics of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey and create an intimate, isolated environment for the participant. The white pods are made of fiberglass and the interior is equipped with acoustic foam, leather upholstery, an LCD monitor, a microphone, and headphones. Visitors are invited to enter the capsules one by one, where they can sing karaoke songs in solitude. The work intends to create an ambivalent experience of sensory and psychological displacement. In addition to the karaoke pods, Live Forever consisted of a new video work that was shot at the Tonga Room, a Tiki-themed lounge in the historic Fairmont Hotel in San Francisco. Lee's video from the Tonga Room, which was produced with the assistance of the San Francisco Art Institute, is projected both outside and inside the pod, while the lyrics of the song selected by the visitor are superimposed on the video. As the film scholar Akira Mizuta Lippit writes, “Live Forever is linked to themes of nostalgia and the human desire for authentic experiences in a culture increasingly dominated by virtual realities.” For the visitor inside the pod wearing the headphones, Live Forever is a solitary experience – only they can hear their singing, which turns into a heavily distorted feedback loop. As the curator Clara Kim notes, for those inside the pod, “the future and the past cross over.”

Mon grand récit Initiated in 2005, the series Mon grand récit is a diverse collection of immersive installations, drawings, and sculptures that explore literary, philosophical, and architectural meditations on utopia and dystopia, state fiction, and social reality. The title Mon grand récit, which translates as “my grand narrative,” reflects Lee's engagement with Jean-Francois Lyotard's critique of the overarching narratives of modernity. By prefixing "mon” or ”my,” Lee emphasizes a personal connection to history, inviting viewers to reconsider societal constructs and their implications for the future. These large-scale installations chronicle the dreamworlds and catastrophes of utopian desire using materials like glass, acrylic, polyurethane, steel and other metals, LED lights, chains, and cables. Central to the series is a work entitled Weep into stones..., where luminous limestone formations, influenced by futuristic architectural visions, are juxtaposed with suspended grids and scaled-down replicas of iconic structures such as Vladimir Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International. The works included under the umbrella of Mon grand récit broadly explore how utopian aspirations surface in architectural forms. Lee mixes in other fragmented references in these works—some are fictions, while others are private memories and imaginings. Lacking an overarching temporal structure, these different elements become detached from historical time and collide with each other. As the curator Jonathan Watkins writes, “This is [...] a world out of joint, fragmented and fractured. It suggests possibilities in a modernist scheme of things, a paradigm that overarches our 20th century, only to undermine them.”

Mon grand récit articulates a critical dialogue between past visions of progress and contemporary uncertainties, resonating with themes of transience and metamorphosis across cultural and historical landscapes. The series tends to avoid famous events, choosing instead to approach turning points from oblique angles, through concrete yet somehow marginal or secondary figures or events. The terms are all in Esperanto, the language developed in the 1880s by Polish linguist Ludoviko Zamenhof with the aim of achieving world peace through a universal language. In several other works associated with Mon grand récit, Lee incorporates reflective surfaces to impart a sense of instability. Bunker (M. Bakhtin) (2007/2012) comprises a roughly hewn mountain that is often installed on a highly glossy black surface, resembling an island adrift on a reflective sea. Viewers can enter the work's cave-like interior through a large-fissure. Bunker (M. Bakhtin) references Yi Gu, the last scion of the Joseon Dynasty, who was called back to Korea from a promising architectural career in New York by Park Chung-hee to rally popular support for his rule. As Mami Kataoka writes, “By entering the crack in the black rock, one can experience a space where memory and reality intermingle, where sounds of places associated with Yi Gu and the sounds of visitor's footsteps melt into each other.” Although Mon grand récit seems to mark a shift in Lee Bul's practice away from the body and towards architecture, landscape, and the history of modernity, Lippit argues that “Lee's turn to history is less a turn away from her earlier focus on bodies, than the endless mourning of the bodies that form and unform her work.”

Perdu Beginning in 2016, the series Perdu continues Lee's exploration of themes such as utopia, dystopia, and the human condition. The series draws inspiration from Lee's preparatory drawings for the Cyborg sculptures, evident in the fusion of organic shapes with hybrid, humanoid forms.

The works are characterized by their intricate amalgamation of organic and industrial materials. Lee employs materials like mother-of-pearl, lacquer, wood, and acrylic paint—meticulously crafting each piece to evoke both fragility and resilience. The series' title, Perdu, French for "lost," alludes to the elusive nature of perfection and the continuous search for an unattainable ideal.

Awards and honors Lee Bul is the winner of the 9th Ruth Baumgarte Art Prize. In 2022, she received an Honorary Doctorate of Fine Arts from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She was awarded the Ho-Am Prize for the Arts in 2019, the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres from the French Ministry of Culture in 2016, and the Noon Award at the 10th Gwangju Biennale in 2014.

In 1998, Lee was selected as one of six shortlisted artists, including Huang Yong Ping, William Kentridge, Pipilotti Rist, Lorna Simpson, and the winner, Douglas Gordon, for the Hugo Boss Prize.

Exhibitions Lee has had solo exhibitions worldwide, including Live Forever which toured the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York and The Power Plant in Toronto. She was selected as a finalist for the 1998 Hugo Boss Prize by the Guggenheim Museum, New York.

Other museums that have presented solo exhibitions of her work include the Vancouver Art Gallery; Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Ikon Gallery, Birmingham; Grand Duke Jean Museum of Modern Art (MUDAM), Luxembourg; Fondation Cartier, Paris; Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney; MAC, Musée d'Art Contemporain, Marseille; Le Consortium; Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philadelphia; and Kunsthalle Bern, Switzerland.

Her two-person exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, titled Projects 57, Bul Lee, Matsui Chie was held in 1997. Lee and Matsui Chie were presented as avant-garde female artists who were using installation art to challenge social norms.

In March 2010, the Hara Museum ARC unveiled a permanent installation by Lee Bul entitled A Fragmentary Anatomy of Every Setting Sun. In February 2012, Tokyo's Mori Art Museum mounted a mid-career survey exhibition, the artist’s largest exhibition to date.

The Southbank Centre's newly reopened Hayward Gallery hosted a survey of Lee's artists work beginning at the end of May 2018, her first in London; which explores the artist's extensive investigation into the body and its relationship to architectural space. Occupying the entire gallery, this exhibition includes documentation of early performances, sculptural works from the iconic Cyborg and Anagram series and recent immersive installations, as well as a selection of the artist's studio drawings. A modified version of this exhibition was subsequently mounted at Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin, in September of 2018.

In November 2020, an exhibition of the artist's work opened at St. Petersburg's Manege Central Exhibition Hall. Titled Lee Bul: Utopia Saved, the exhibition “marks a first-time encounter between Lee Bul's works and those by artists of the Russian avant-garde that influenced them.”

In November 2023, the Metropolitan Museum of Art (The Met), New York, announced the selection of Lee Bul for its Fifth Avenue façade commission, her first major project in the United States since her 2002 solo exhibition at the New Museum. Titled The Genesis Facade Commission: Lee Bul, Long Tail Halo, the four sculptures comprising the commission were unveiled on September 12, 2024, and remains on view until May 27, 2025.

Solo Exhibitions

2025: Lee Bul: After 1998 at Leeum Museum of Art; traveled to M+ Museum, Hong Kong, 2026

2024: Long Tail Halo, Metropolitan Museum of Art Lee Bul: Prints, BB&M, Seoul

2023: Lee Bul: Prints, STPI - Creative Workshop & Gallery Solo exhibition at the Sara Hildén Art Museum in Tampere, Finland, Sara Hilden Art Museum Lee Bul, BB&M, Seoul Lee Bul, Ely Place Lee Bul, Gothenburg Museum of Art

2022 Lee Bul, Thaddaeus Ropac, Paris

2021 Lee Bul: New and Selected Works, BB&M, Seoul Lee Bul: Beginning, Seoul Museum of Art Recombinance, Lehmann Maupin, New York

2020 Utopia Saved, The Manege Central Exhibition Hall, St. Petersburg, Russia

2019 Interlude: Perdu, Lehmann Maupin, New York Lee Bul: City of the Sun, SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah, Georgia

2018 Lee Bul: Crash, Gropius Bau, Berlin Lee Bul: Crashing, Hayward Gallery, London

2017 After Bruno Taut, Thaddaeus Ropac, London Lee Bul, Lehmann Maupin, New York

2016 Connect 1: Still Acts, Art Sonje Center, Seoul

2015 Lee Bul, Vancouver Art Gallery Lee Bul: Aubade III, Palais de Tokyo, Paris Lee Bul, PKM Gallery, Seoul Lee Bul, Espai d'Art Contemporani de Castelló, Spain Lee Bul: Into Lattice Sun, Swarovski Kristallwelten, Wattens, Austria Lee Bul, Musée d'art Moderne et Contemporain de Saint-Etienne Métropole, France

2014 MMCA Hyundai Motor Series 2014: Lee Bul, National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul Lee Bul, Korean Cultural Centre UK, London Lee Bul, Ikon Gallery, Birmingham, UK Lee Bul, Lehmann Maupin, New York

2013 Lee Bul, Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean, Luxembourg Pure Invisible Sun, Thaddaeus Ropac, Paris Lee Bul: Inaugural Hong Kong Exhibition, Lehmann Maupin, Hong Kong

2012 Lee Bul, Art Sonje Center, Seoul Lee Bul: From Me, Belongs to You Only, Mori Art Museum, Tokyo

2010 Lee Bul, PKM Trinity Gallery, Seoul Lee Bul, Lehmann Maupin, New York

2009 Drawings, Thaddaeus Ropac, Paris

2008 Lee Bul, PKM Trinity Gallery, Seoul Lee Bul, Lehmann Maupin, New York

2007 Lee Bul: On Every New Shadow, Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, Paris Lee Bul, Thaddaeus Ropac, Salzburg Lee Bul, PKM Gallery, Seoul Lee Bul: Aseptia, Domus Artium 02, Salamanca, Spain

2005 Lee Bul -S2-, SCAI The Bathhouse, Tokyo Lee Bul: 2005 International Artist in Residence, Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, New Plymouth, New Zealand

2004 Lee Bul, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney Lee Bul, PKM Gallery, Seoul Lee Bul: Monsters, Deitch Projects, New York

2003 Lee Bul: Live Forever, Henry Art Gallery, Seattle Lee Bul: The Monster Show, Centre for Contemporary Arts, Glasgow Lee Bul: Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, Ohara Museum of Art, Kurashiki, Japan Lee Bul: Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, Japan Foundation, Tokyo Lee Bul: Live Forever, Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, Arizona

2002 Lee Bul: Live Forever, The Power Plant, Toronto Lee Bul: The Monster Show, Musées d’art Contemporain de Marseille Lee Bul: Live Forever, Jean Paul Slusser Gallery, Ann Arbor, Michigan Lee Bul: Live Forever, New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York Lee Bul: The Monster Show, Consortium Museum, Dijon, France Lee Bul Drawings: Cultural Body, PKM Gallery, Seoul Lee Bul, Rodin Gallery, Samsung Museum of Art, Seoul Lee Bul: Live Forever, Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach, California

2001 Lee Bul: Live Forever, Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philadelphia Lee Bul: Cyborgs, SCAI the Bathhouse, Tokyo Lee Bul: Live Forever, San Francisco Art Institute Lee Bul: The Divine Shell, BAWAG Foundation, Vienna

2000 Lee Bul: Monster + Cyborg, Fukuoka Asian Art Museum, Japan Futuristic Baroque, Kukje Gallery, Seoul

1999 Lee Bul, Noh Sang-Kyoon, Korean Pavilion, The 48th Venice Biennale Lee Bul, Kunsthalle Bern, Switzerland

1998 Lee Bul, Art Sonje Center, Seoul

1997 Projects, Museum of Modern Art, New York

1994 Unforgiven, A Space, Toronto

1988 Step by Step, Th-that's, IL Gallery, Seoul