FRIEZE 2025 Garden of broken utopias: Lee Bul at Leeum Museum of Art

Artist Lee Bul / Courtesy of Leeum Museum of Art

What happens when the body once used to protest grows into a vessel for something greater?

When Lee Bul first stormed onto Korea's art scene in the late 1980s, she did so with bodily defiance — a force that shocked, unsettled and jolted other bodies awake.

In 1989, she dangled nude from the rafters of a Seoul theater, with ropes biting into her skin as she spoke of her own abortion, then still a criminal act in the country. The following year, she roamed the streets of Korea and Japan in a grotesque costume of flesh and tentacles. For 12 days, passersby gawked and recoiled at her unruly presence. Her answer to their stares came in the performance’s wry title: “Sorry for Suffering — You think I’m a puppy on a picnic?”

By 1997, her provocations reached New York’s Museum of Modern Art, where she unveiled the infamous “Majestic Splendor,” rows of dead fish sealed in plastic bags, their scales bedazzled with cheap sequins. The work embodied a visceral tension between glittering ideals of feminine beauty and decaying bodies. But its odor grew so noxious that it forced the museum to pull it from view within days.

Installation view of "Lee Bul: From 1998 to Now" at the Leeum Museum of Art / Courtesy of Leeum Museum of Art

Curiously, the artist’s new mid-career survey at the Leeum Museum of Art, “Lee Bul: From 1998 to Now,” bypasses the shock and stench of her sensational beginnings, starting instead with what came after.

“Lee’s works before 1998 remain etched in our memory for their searing commentaries on a patriarchal and politically unstable Korea. It’s why she is still often called a ‘woman warrior’ here. But reflecting on the three decades that followed, I wondered whether we have truly grasped the scope of her practice,” said Kwak June-young, who co-curated the exhibition with Chong Do-ryun, artistic director at Hong Kong’s M+, Monday.

If Lee’s early performances wrestled with the confines of her own body and its clash with immediate social oppression, her later practice began stretching outward, situating the human body within larger systemic current: technology, environment, history, ideology and the era’s zeitgeist.

“As we grow, our concerns widen — from the self, to those around us, and at last, to the time and world we inhabit. My work has unfolded in much the same way,” the 61-year-old said with the commanding charisma that has long marked her presence.

It’s under such a lens that her Leeum exhibition unfurls, with more than 150 sculptures, installations, drawings and paintings shimmering into focus.

Lee Bul's "Via Negativa" (2022), a reconstruction of the 2012 installation / Courtesy of Leeum Museum of Art

Installation view of "Lee Bul: From 1998 to Now" at the Leeum Museum of Art / Courtesy of Leeum Museum of Art

One of the defining conceptual threads in Lee’s oeuvre since the 2000s is suggested by the very title of her ongoing installation series, “Mon Grand Recit,” or “My Grand Narrative.”

The phrase draws on the philosopher Jean-Francois Lyotard, who used “grand recit” to describe the ambitious doctrines that once defined modernity — master-theories like the Enlightenment or Marxism, which attempted to unify countless human experiences under a single universal truth. These narratives promised utopian progress for all humankind, yet history has shown, time after time, how spectacularly they’ve failed.

The artist takes this collapse as her stage. In works that resemble fragmented architectures, precarious scaffolds and crumbling monuments, she asks what it means to live among the ruins of broken ideals. When the grand narratives that once sought to shape our histories falter, what gets left behind? What micro-stories, subjective truths or imagined futures can emerge from the wreckage?

As a result, the Leeum Museum becomes Lee’s garden of failed utopias.

Lee Bul's "Willing To Be Vulnerable — Metalized Balloon" (2015-16/2020) / Courtesy of Leeum Museum of Art

Inside the hall looms “Willing To Be Vulnerable — Metalized Balloon,” a 17-meter-long inflatable hovering with quiet menace. Its form echoes the zeppelin, the soaring emblem of early 20th-century German ambition, which met its destructive end in the Hindenburg disaster of 1937. By reimagining the vessel as a monumental yet weightless presence, she points to both the fervor of technological progress and the inevitability of its collapse.

Some works bear more direct ties to Korea’s turbulent modern history, refracted through the artist’ private recollections.

“Bunker (M. Bakhtin)” evokes the military outposts that dotted the mountainous village of her childhood. To Lee, these fortresses carried a paradoxical meaning: grim symbols of postwar division, yet strangely protective. Because her parents were branded left-wing dissidents, their home was subject to routine searches; the bunkers, by contrast, were concrete and immovable, offering a stability her own household could not.

Lee Bul's "Aubade V" (2019) / Courtesy of Leeum Museum of Art

“Aubade V” was built from debris salvaged after the guard posts along the Demilitarized Zone were dismantled in the wake of the 2018 inter-Korean summit. It seemed to stand as a relic of tentative reconciliation. Yet just a few years later, the agreement collapsed and the posts were rebuilt. What remains is her spectral monument, a reminder of ideology’s stubborn persistence.

As Lee continues conjuring distorted paradises, her artistic engagement with ideology has at times been dismissed as outdated. Yet two decades on, in an age marked by deepening polarization and extremism, her work feels more relevant than ever. How does she view this cycle?

“The past is always summoned into the present. It doesn’t simply go away. People say, ‘That’s an old issue, we’ve moved on, let’s speak in a new paradigm.’ But for me, the ground beneath us is still littered with its remnants. Even if it changes form, it never truly disappears. We’ve never overcome it — and until we do, we can’t move forward.”

“Lee Bul: From 1998 to Now” runs through Jan. 4, 2026, at the Leeum Museum of Art. After its Seoul presentation, the show will travel to M+ in March.