Nearly 40 years have passed since Lee Bul broke through as an artist with her iconic 1989 Abortion performance. Fastened in rope, Lee, a recent graduate from a prestigious sculpture BFA program, dangled naked from the ceiling of a Seoul art center and delivered an impassioned account of her own abortion during the country’s ban on the procedure. (Abortions were only fully decriminalized in South Korea in 2021.)
A lifelong rebel against convention, Lee gained early domestic recognition through her guerrilla-like performance work in the late 1980s and early ’90s, coinciding with South Korea’s transition from military dictatorship to nascent democracy. Then, in 1997, she became an international sensation when she displayed 49 bejeweled fish—decomposing in plastic bags—at New York’s MoMA as part of a dual exhibition with the Japanese artist Chie Matsui exploring beauty and decay. The rotting smell of Majestic Splendor became so putrid that the museum removed the installation.
During that same decade, as scientists successfully cloned a mammal for the first time (a sheep called Dolly), Lee began experimenting with the cyborg form. Seeing news of advancements in cell cloning, she recognized a perpetual desire that humans have to outsmart their condition as humans. Technology, she observed, advances alongside that desire. Exploring that relationship, Lee created her acclaimed “Cyborg” series, which evoked disembodied part-woman, part-machine figures.
In “The Anatomy of Every Setting Sun,” her first-ever exhibition with Hauser & Wirth, which opened earlier this month in New York, a selection of Lee’s recent artworks go a “step further” in the artist’s exploration into the human-technology relationship, curator and art historian Jiyoon Lee tells CULTURED, by “looking at modernity itself: the project built on the belief that humans could design a better future through technology and reason.”
Now 62, Lee is fascinated by the optimism that technological advancements symbolize, the artist explained through an interpreter earlier this month, requesting not to be directly quoted.
The zenith of her Hauser & Wirth presentation is Willing To Be Vulnerable—Metalized Balloon, 2015–16/2020, a 17-meter-long inflated PET-film sculpture, which hovers behind a partition on the gallery’s first floor. (A version of the sculpture first appeared as a site-specific work at the 2016 Biennale of Sydney. In the Hauser & Wirth iteration, Lee has added a mirrored wall featuring stenciled designs of headless figures riding unicycles.)
The suspended work captures the fragility of each human attempt to gain mastery over nature through invention. The artist modeled her inflatable sculpture after the Hindenburg Zeppelin, a blimp-like passenger aircraft—heralded in the early 20th century for its unprecedented capacity to transport passengers and goods—that combusted in Germany in 1937. (Soon after the disaster, the airship was discontinued.)
“It looks like an enormous spaceship of the future,” says Jiyoon Lee, “yet it carries an anxiety that a single pinprick could deflate it entirely.”
While the Zeppelin was pulled from the sky after its fiery disaster, Lee says its image, along with the hopes it once embodied, lingers in the popular imagination. In South Korea, the artist explains, Zeppelin-shaped airships are used to display advertisements. When a technology falls flat or fails, all that is left is the vision it once represented.
On a wall adjacent to Willing To Be Vulnerable—Metalized Balloon hangs a layered painting Lee created this year, Untitled (Willing To Be Vulnerable—Velvet #29). The work is part of an ongoing series wherein Lee laboriously coats a silk base with mother-of-pearl, a natural material derived from the shimmering coat found inside mollusks, creating what she described as an imaginary landscape. New paintings from her ongoing “Perdu” series also use mother-of-pearl and adapt her cyborg forms to a two-dimensional plane.
Four muscular sculptures, which she created as an addendum to her prestigious 2024 Met facade commission, are spread across the mega-gallery’s first floor. While researching the Met’s collection, Lee said she observed that the volume of stories the encyclopedic museum attempted to share simultaneously felt like a calamitous uproar. Her fascination with its expansive holdings brought about sculptures that combine elements of the movements the museum displays, including Cubism, Futurism, and Greco-Roman Classic sculpture.
The Hauser & Wirth show builds on the Met commission’s momentum and a resurgence of interest for Lee’s work stateside. It also arrives at a climactic moment for the themes Lee has tackled throughout her career. Earlier this month, the CEOs of the artificial intelligence companies Anthropic and OpenAI called for an industry slowdown after a whistleblower cautioned that the technology could “kill us all by the end of the decade.” In “The Anatomy of Every Setting Sun,” Lee exposes the human ideals that led to this exponential accelerationism in the first place.
“[Lee’s] subject has widened from the individual body to civilization,” Jiyoon Lee concludes, “but the question of the desire to overcome our limits, and the vulnerability beneath it, has remained the same from the beginning.
More of our favorite stories from CULTURED
Introducing CULTURED’s 2026 Young Photographers List
Lily Rabe Tells Chris Messina What It’s Like to Return to the Stage After a Decade Away
How Matthew Wong, David Zwirner, and No Small Dose of Grit Turned This Octogenarian Into an Art Star
All the Movies Worth Seeing (And a Few That Weren’t) Coming Out of TIFF’s First Week
Speed Round! 19 Critics Pick the NYC Shows to Add to Your Map This September
Sign up for our newsletter here to get these stories direct to your inbox.
in your life?
