ANTWERP.- On November 13, M HKA will open Lee Bul: From 1998 to Now, the artist’s most comprehensive survey to date. Lee Bul is a key figure in contemporary art, with an internationally recognised practice. Featuring major installations — including Willing To Be Vulnerable — Metalized Balloon (2019), a ten-metre-long zeppelin — the exhibition unfolds across two floors of the museum, a first for a solo exhibition at M HKA.

Tracing key developments in her practice from the late 1990s to today, the exhibition brings together more than 150 works, ranging from drawings, maquettes and two-dimensional works to sculptures and monumental installations. Across this diverse body of work, Lee Bul explores modernist and utopian visions of the future, architecture and the historical avant-garde.

Lee Bul: From 1998 to Now is co-organised by M+ in Hong Kong, in collaboration with M HKA. The exhibition premiered in Seoul in September 2025 for a four-month run, and travelled to Hong Kong from March to August 2026. M HKA in Antwerp will be its first and only European stop. The tour will conclude at the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa in late 2027.

A comprehensive survey of Lee Bul tours to Europe

Lee Bul (b. 1964) first rose to prominence in the late 1980s with performances exploring the relationship between the body, gender and society within South Korea’s shifting social and political landscape. From the 1990s onwards, she increasingly turned to sculpture and architectural installations, where her iconic Cyborg series marked a turning point in her practice. Today, Lee Bul is an artist of global significance. She has exhibited widely in Europe, with presentations at venues such as Hayward Gallery and Gropius Bau.

This Autumn, Antwerp will host the first and only European presentation of this comprehensive survey, Lee Bul: From 1998 to Now. The tour will conclude at the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa in late 2027.

Lee Bul examines the possibilities and failures of modernist utopia through architecture and the historical avant-garde. What possible futures can we imagine? And how might the relationship between body and society, humanity and technology, and nature and civilisation evolve within them? The exhibition approaches these questions through three interconnected strands: Landscapes of Utopian Dreams, the Relationship Between the Body and Technology, and Lee Bul’s Creative Process.

Nav Haq, Senior curator at M HKA: “While Lee Bul’s work engages with major themes, it remains highly accessible and full of hope. That is what makes her work so relevant today.

M HKA looks back on Lee Bul’s artistic practice through more than 150 works from her studio and from collections around the world. We are especially pleased to bring her expansive body of work to Europe and to Antwerp for the first time”.

Doryun Chong, Artistic Director and Chief Curator at M+, and exhibition co-curator: “A leading figure in contemporary art, Lee Bul has developed a remarkably broad and deeply layered body of work over the past four decades, making significant contributions to the global art world. Organised through a curatorial collaboration between Leeum Museum of Art and M+, this exhibition considers the inseparable nature of hope and failure in human progress, a theme that resonates with particular urgency today.”

Welcome to Lee Bul’s world

Lee Bul’s sculptural installations make the exhibition an immersive one. In each gallery, key central works are in dialogue with smaller pieces. “Lee Bul will occupy two floors entirely. This is the first time we have ever done this for a solo exhibition at M HKA”, Haq continues. “We want to immerse everyone, from connoisseurs to curious visitors, in the impressive work of one of the world’s most influential contemporary artists practicing today”.

One of the eye-catchers is a ten-metre-long zeppelin: Willing To Be Vulnerable — Metalized Balloon occupies the museum’s Pointed Hall. The zeppelin evokes the inventive spirit of the avant-garde. “Belgians will feel a spirit reminiscent of Panamarenko – the same distinct vitality and sense of invention”, Haq explains. With the gleaming airship as a symbol, Lee Bul questions the impact of such failed progress on the world of today and tomorrow.

The same hall features a work from the Aubade series, evoking cityscapes onto which utopian messages are projected in Esperanto, the 'universal' language.

On the upper floor will be shown Aubade V, another work from this series: a tower-like structure made from dismantled guard posts from the demilitarised zone between North and South Korea. The message on the LED screen is an astronomical fact describing the Earth's tilt, which makes the countries' ideological conflicts seem small in comparison.

Cyborg, her iconic series from the late 1990s, marked her shift from performance to sculptural practice, and from the body to the-future-of-the-body. The cyborgs are created with technological enhancements that recall both classical Greco-Roman style-sculpture and the aesthetics of science fiction. A key Cyborg work is presented here alongside porcelain pieces connected to the series.

From studio to installation

Visitors are also given insight into Lee Bul’s studio and creative process. An extensive selection of sketches, drawings and maquettes demonstrate her ideas emerge and evolve: from initial concept and scale models to life-sized installations. Her distinctly hands-on practice makes this preparatory phase all the more important. Though the sleek, glossy installations may appear high-tech, they are in fact entirely handmade.

Lee Bul: From 1998 to Now is a richly visual, hopeful and accessible exhibition for visitors of all ages. Like Panamarenko, Lee Bul invites visitors to look at the world with greater imagination and a stronger sense of invention. Her work carries them into a wondrous world where dreams, technology and architecture meet.

Lee Bul (South Korea, born 1964) is widely recognised as the foremost Korean artist of her generation. Educated in Seoul, she broke with her academic training (BFA in sculpture from Hongik University, Seoul) to establish her early reputation with provocative genre- and discipline-crossing works exploring themes of the female body, beauty and decay. Since the early 2000s, her work has engaged with themes of utopian modernity, the historical avant-garde in art and architecture, and the rise and fall of ideas aimed at reinventing the world.

Her oeuvre has been deeply informed by her experience growing up as the daughter of political dissidents during a period of turbulent political and social transformation in Korea. Now in the fourth decade of her career, she is a pioneering figure to a younger generation of artists influenced by the sensibilities and methods of her practice, from her early iconoclastic performances to her multi-sensory installations and material explorations that have pushed the formal and conceptual boundaries of visual art.

Lee Bul’s works have been showcased in major institutions throughout the world, including the Seoul Museum of Art; Martin Gropius Bau, Berlin; the Hayward Gallery, London; Palais de Tokyo, Paris; the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul; the Mori Art Museum, Tokyo; Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, Paris; the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney; the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York; Leeum Museum of Art, Seoul; and Art Sonje Center, Seoul. In 2024, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, invited Lee to create sculptures for the niches of the museum’s iconic Fifth Avenue facade; a Genesis Facade Commission, the project was titled Lee Bul, Long Tail Halo.

Lee Bul: From 1998 to Now is co-organised by M+ and Leeum Museum of Art in collaboration with M HKA. Following its presentation at M HKA, the exhibition will travel to the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa, Canada ending in late 2027.