M+ in Hong Kong is giving Lee Bul her largest museum platform yet: an expanded retrospective that surveys the Korean artist’s work from 1998 to the present, bringing together more than 200 pieces ranging from cyborg sculptures and drawings to architectural environments and immersive installations.
Titled “Lee Bul — From 1998 to Now,” the exhibition is co-organized with the Leeum Museum of Art in Seoul, where it debuted in September 2025 and runs through January 4, 2026. M+ opens its Hong Kong presentation on March 14, 2026, enlarging the project with additional loans and newly produced works. The show is conceived as a traveling exhibition that will continue to major international institutions through autumn 2027.
Across nearly three decades, Bul has treated the body, architecture, and technology as interlocking systems — a way to test the promises of modernity against its recurring breakdowns. The exhibition’s structure favors typologies over a strict timeline, grouping works into three major sections that allow viewers to move between panoramic themes and close readings.
The opening galleries center on Bul’s emblematic “Cyborg” and “Anagram” series, alongside her well-known karaoke installation first shown at the Venice Biennale in 1999. Here, sculpture, performance documentation, and participatory elements converge around bodies that appear fragmented, hybridized, and visibly “wired” into networks of power. The suspended and dismantled figures are rooted in the social and political conditions of South Korea’s rapid transformation in the late 1980s and 1990s, while also speaking to broader questions of alienation, control, and desire in technologically mediated life.
The exhibition’s middle section turns to “Mon grand récit,” a body of work Bul initiated in 2005 and positioned as a pivotal chapter in the retrospective. These large-scale architectural installations propose broken topographies — ramps, platforms, and hanging structures — that hover between utopian model and the debris field of a futuristic city. The environments draw on a wide range of references, from visionary architecture and modernist utopias, including Bruno Taut, to the fraught history of modern Korea. In Bul’s hands, the grand narratives of political progress and technological salvation read less like blueprints than like ruins: ambitious, seductive, and already collapsing.
At the Leeum, the retrospective assembled around 150 works spanning sculpture, installation, drawings, models, and performance documents. In Hong Kong, M+ extends the scope to more than 200 works sourced from the artist’s studio as well as institutional and private collections across Asia and beyond. The expanded presentation also adds 49 early works from the late 1990s to early 2000s, alongside pieces produced in 2024.
By staging the most extensive retrospective yet devoted to Lee Bul (b. 1964), the Seoul and Hong Kong institutions place her practice firmly within a global museum circuit — and underscore how her recurring subjects, from cyborg bodies to speculative architecture, continue to illuminate the uneasy space between modernity’s aspirations and its aftermath.
