Lee Bul at M+: Futuristic Dreams and Human Fragility
A two-decade survey of Lee Bul’s work at M+ explores utopian ambition, hybrid bodies, and the fragile architectures of human imagination.
There are few contemporary artists whose work so insistently straddles the line between spectacle and reflection as Lee Bul. From 1998 to Now, opening at M+ in Hong Kong this March, traces more than two decades of a practice that interrogates the body, technology, and the illusions of modernity. With over 200 works spanning sculpture, installation, and two-dimensional art — including forty-nine early pieces and recent works from 2024 — the exhibition offers an unusually detailed view of an artist whose career has been defined by experimentation and scale.
Entering the galleries, visitors encounter the Mon grand récit series: vast, skeletal architectural forms that conjure both ambition and fragility, utopian dreams built on impossible premises. Against these, the Perdu series and Velvet works provide a counterpoint in smaller, intimate gestures, exploring materiality and the traces of human presence. The Cyborg and Anagram series, dating from the late 1990s, reconfigure the body through hybrid forms that suggest both enhancement and obsolescence, drawing on science fiction as readily as art history.
The exhibition’s final section, “Inside the Artist’s Mind,” foregrounds drawings and meticulously scaled maquettes, revealing a process that is as philosophical as it is visual. Here, Lee’s ongoing dialogue with failure, memory, and speculative futures becomes explicit: these are works that do not merely depict ideas, but test them, spatially and conceptually.
For UK audiences who may have encountered Lee’s work at the Hayward Gallery or international festivals, the M+ presentation emphasizes her global significance while situating her work in Asia’s rapidly transforming cultural landscape.
| More details can be found here – https://mplus.org.hk/ |
Elena Leo is the Culture & Lifestyle Editor of Ikon London Magazine.
