PRESENATION:Lee Bul-The Anatomy of Every Setting Sun

Having graduated from Seoul’s Hongik University with a BFA in sculpture, Lee Bul 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. 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”.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Hauser & Wirth Gallery

Since then, Lee Bul’s work has increasingly explored the enduring themes of utopian modernity and the rise and fall of progressivist projects, influenced by her own experience as the daughter of political dissidents during Korea’s turbulent social and political transformation. At the center of  Lee Bul’s exhibition “The Anatomy of Every Setting Sun”’ and levitating in the ground floor space is “Willing To Be Vulnerable—Metalized Balloon” (2015–2016/2020), a massive zeppelin-like sculpture fabricated from lightweight materials such as PET film. Part of a series first conceived in 2016; this commanding work transforms one of modernity’s defining symbols of progress into an unsettling meditation on fragility and impermanence. Hovering between monument and ruin, the sculpture evokes both the optimism long associated with technological innovation and the precarities beneath humanity’s pursuit of mastery over the natural world.

The exhibition also debuts new paintings from Lee’s ongoing “Untitled (Willing To Be Vulnerable—Velvet)” series, each of which takes months—and often years—to complete. Lee begins with photographs of her own sculptures and installations, then layers them with source imagery, fragments of material from her studio, and intricately cut pieces of mother-of-pearl. Applied to rich silk velvet grounds, these elements coalesce into phantasmagorical landscapes populated by crystalline architectures that seem to belong to imagined future worlds. Combining elements shaped by biological processes—silk velvet and mother-of-pearl—with man-made materials such as acrylic, these works blur the boundaries between the organic and the synthetic, the bodily and the technological. They oscillate between growth and decay, completion and fragmentation, suggesting that even humanity’s most ambitious visions of the future remain unfinished.

New works from Lee’s ongoing “Perdu” series further explore the porous threshold between painting and sculpture through an exacting process in which mother-of-pearl is embedded within layers of acrylic paint that are repeatedly applied and sanded to reveal shifting, radiant surfaces. These materially rich works extend the artist’s longstanding interest in the interplay between the organic and the synthetic. While earlier ‘Perdu’ works drew on the hybrid visual language of Lee’s biomorphic sculptures, these latest examples shift toward increasingly abstract architectural landscapes, extending her examination of utopian modernity.

The exhibition culminates in a group of new large-scale sculptures that further develop ideas first explored in Lee’s  2024 commission “Long Tail Halo” for the Fifth Avenue façade of The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Fusing bodily, mechanical and architectural forms, these hybrid structures continue her longstanding interrogation of the monuments through which societies project power. At once futuristic and fragmentary, they exist between organism and architecture, exposing the instability beneath modernity’s grand narratives while imagining new forms. Together with “Willing To Be Vulnerable— Metalized Balloon” these works bring Lee’s sustained examination of modernity, technology and the body into sharp new focus.

Photo: Lee Bul, Willing To Be Vulnerable—Metalized Balloon , 2015-2016/2020, Fabric, PET film, air blower, electrical wiring, Installation view of the 20th Biennale of Sydney, Sydney, Australia, 2016., © Lee Bul, Photo: Algirdas Bakas, Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth Gallery

Info: Hauser & Wirth Gallery, 542 West 22nd Street, New York, NY, USA, Duration: 10/9-24/10/2026, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.hauserwirth.com/