Lee Bul, one of Korea’s leading artists, will now be represented by Hauser & Wirth. The gallery will have two works by her in its booth at Art Basel Hong Kong next week. Next year, the gallery will mount a solo show for her in New York.
The move to Hauser & Wirth means that Lee will no longer work with her two longtime dealers: Thaddaeus Ropac, who has shown her since 2007, and Lehmann Maupin, who has shown her since 2008. However, Hauser & Wirth will share representation with Lee’s Seoul gallery, BB&M, which has shown her since 2022.
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Since the 1990s, Lee has been known for interdisciplinary practice—one comprising sculptures, installations, performances, and paintings—that has looked at how technology has altered our lives. and She’s also focused on the fulfillment of, or estrangement from, utopian ideals once offered by technology.
Among her most famous series in this vein are her “Cyborg” sculptures and her alien-like “Anagram” works from the early 2000s. At Art Basel Hong Kong, Hauser & Wirth will display Untitled (Anagram Leather #11 T.O.T.), from 2003/2018, a spindly leather-covered cast fiberglass sculpture and new abstract painting Perdu CCIX.
Most recently, Lee’s work was prominently featured at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York as part of the museum’s facade commission. Her work will again feature at the Met in its forthcoming group exhibition “Monstrous Beauty: A Feminist Revision of Chinoiserie.” Later this year, she will have a traveling mid-career retrospective that will debut at the Leeum Museum of Art in Seoul in September before heading to M+ in Hong Kong in March 2026.
On the biennial circuit, she has featured in the 1999 and 2019 editions of the Venice Biennale, the 2016 Sydney Biennale, the 2018 Bangkok Art Biennale, Manifesta 14 in 2022, and Prospect.1 in New Orleans in 2008.
“Lee [Bul] is recognized as the foremost Korean artist of her generation,” Hauser & Wirth president Marc Payot said in a statement. “Combining conceptual rigor and a nuanced approach to materiality with a deep and profound humanism, her work continues to evolve in fascinating new directions. Lee has expressed admiration for artists in our gallery’s roster, in particular Phyllida Barlow and Louise Bourgeois, and points of connection within our program. Now in the fourth decade of her career, she is seen as a pioneer by younger generations of artists who are deeply influenced by the sensibility of her early work, her iconoclastic performances and the multi-sensory installations that expanded the formal and conceptual boundaries of visual art.”