NEW YORK, NY.- The Metropolitan Museum of Art will host a new suite of sculptures by South Korean artist Lee Bul (born 1964, Yeongju; based in Seoul) in the niches of its Fifth Avenue facade that will be unveiled to the public on September 12. Commissioned by the Museum, The Genesis Facade Commission: Lee Bul, Long Tail Halo marks Lee’s first major project in the United States in over 20 years.
"Lee Bul's extraordinary sculptures explore the complexities of the human condition through powerful, hybrid forms that draw from the past while speaking to present day hopes and anxieties about the future," said Max Hollein, The Met’s Marina Kellen French Director and Chief Executive Officer. "This commission series invites artists to engage with, transform, and even challenge The Met's iconic Fifth Avenue facade, and we're tremendously excited to unveil Lee’s works this fall."
With a career that spans four decades, Lee is widely recognized as one of the most preeminent artists from South Korea. She is known for her sophisticated use of both highly industrial and labor-intensive materials, such as fabric, metal, plastic, silicone, porcelain, and glass, and incorporating artisanal methods as well as technological advancements into the conceptual and material dimension of her work. Often evoking bodily forms that are at once classical and futuristic, her sculptures address the aspirations and disillusions that come with progress. For this commission for the Museum’s historic niches, Lee has created four sculptures that combine figurative and abstract elements. Two of Lee's works in the Museum's collection, Untitled (cyborg leg) (2000) and Untitled (cyborg pelvis) (2000), are currently featured in Lineages: Korean Art at The Met, an exhibition that celebrates the 25th anniversary of the Museum's Arts of Korea gallery and is on view through October 20, 2024.
The upcoming installation is the first under a new multiyear partnership with Genesis to present the annual contemporary art commission, which was newly named The Genesis Facade Commission. Each year, The Met invites artists to create new works of art, establishing a dialogue between the artist's practice, The Met collection, the physical Museum, and The Met’s audiences. It will be the fifth in a series of contemporary commissions for The Met's facade that previously featured work by Wangechi Mutu (2019), Carol Bove (2021), Hew Locke (2022), and Nairy Baghramian (2023).
Lee Bul is a formidable leading artist of her generation who works across a diverse range of media—from drawing, sculpture, and painting to performance, installation, and video—to examine themes of beauty, desire, corruption, and decay. The Genesis Facade Commission will be Lee's first major project in the United States since her solo exhibition at the New Museum in New York in 2002. Lee represented her country at the 48th Venice Biennale in 1999 and received the prestigious Ho-Am Prize in South Korea in 2019.
Since her breakthrough performances in the late 1980s in Seoul and Tokyo wearing sewn sculptural forms, Lee has been heralded as a pioneer in contemporary sculpture and installation. She is most known for her sculptural figures and landscapes that blur the boundaries between the natural and the artificial and are sensuous yet fragmented, forthcoming yet enigmatic. These dramatic constructions critique progress-driven, perfection-obsessed values through transformations of familiar forms. Structurally and visually complex, Lee's work also explores the aspirations and failures of utopian visions and exposes a sense of vulnerability and melancholy in history.
