Lee Bul
From 1998 to Now
Leeum Museum of Art, Seoul

Over the last three decades, Lee Bul’s sculptural oeuvre has aesthetically and intellectually delved into humanity’s failures. For the South Korean artist, our dazzling dreams and collective aspirations always come back to us as cautionary ruins, revealing how the aspirations of modernity inevitably dissolve into melancholic remnants of what we have lost or never achieved. To quote historian David Lowenthal: “Relics, histories, and memories suffuse human experience. . . . Noticed or ignored, cherished or spurned, the past is omnipresent.”

This sentiment pervaded Lee’s major retrospective at the Leeum Museum of Art in Seoul, “Lee Bul: From 1998 to Now,” a joint curatorial effort with Hong Kong’s M+ Museum, which gathered more than 150 works across sculpture, installation, drawing, and maquette. Tracing her early works to the present day, the exhibition was more than a straightforward career survey, offering a dense cartography of thought and form that situated Lee as a central voice in global contemporary art.