M+ in Hong Kong has unveiled its major spring exhibition, “Lee Bul: From 1998 to Now,” a comprehensive survey of the pioneering South Korean artist. The show cements Lee’s status as one of the most significant contemporary artists to emerge from Asia over the past four decades.

Born in 1964, Lee first rose to prominence in the late 1980s with works that critically responded to the socio-political shifts in Korea. Since then, she has developed a diverse, multidisciplinary practice spanning sculpture, installation, and works on paper. This extensive exhibition brings together more than 200 pieces from the artist’s studio and public and private collections across Asia, supplemented by 49 additional works that illuminate Lee’s late-1990s to early-2000s practice as well as recent pieces created in 2024.

The exhibition is structured into three distinct yet interconnected parts, guiding visitors through Lee’s central preoccupations: the fragile relationship between body and society, humanity’s evolving relationship with technology, and the cyclical interplay of hope and failure that shapes human progress.

Part one, “The Realm of Utopian Dreams,” creates an immersive environment centered on Lee’s iconic “Mon grand récit” series (2005–ongoing). These architecturally scaled sculptures probe the grand narratives of modernism and the aesthetics of utopian collapse. Juxtaposed with them are works from the “Perdu” and “Willing to Be Vulnerable — Velvet” series (both 2016–ongoing), which use industrial and organic materials to contemplate the complexities of history, memory, and modernity.

The second chapter, “The Body and Technology,” revisits the groundbreaking “Cyborg and Anagram” series from the late 1990s and early 2000s that first brought Lee international acclaim. These striking works reimagine classical figurative forms, fusing them with futuristic, biomechanical elements. Drawing on critical theory, art history, and science fiction, the pieces interrogate idealized notions of perfection, gender, and beauty in an increasingly technological world.

The exhibition concludes with “Inside the Artist’s Mind,” a rare glimpse into Lee’s creative process. This section features approximately 100 drawings and dozens of precise maquettes that function both as independent works and as studies for her larger installations. Together they reveal the conceptual rigor behind her practice and how philosophical inquiry is translated into compelling visual form.

Having debuted at the Leeum Museum of Art in Seoul in September 2025, the traveling survey opened at M+ before continuing to venues in Europe and North America. A comprehensive monograph co-published with Thames & Hudson accompanies the exhibition, offering new scholarly perspectives on an artist who continues to shape the discourse of Asian and global contemporary art.

(SD News)

Dates: Through Aug. 9

Venue: West Gallery, M+, West Kowloon Cultural District, Hong Kong