Lee Bul

Bringing together more than 100 works from the late 1980s to the present day, this exhibition explored the full range of Lee Bul’s pioneering and thought-provoking practice, from provocative early performances to recent large-scale installations that attempt to get our body and our brain ‘working at the same time, together’.

For the past three decades, Lee Bul has drawn on diverse sources that include science fiction, visionary architecture and personal experience, whilst making use of deliberately clashing materials that range from silk and mother of pearl to fibreglass and silicone. At the core of her most recent work is an investigation into landscape, which for the artist includes the intimate landscape of the body, ideal or fictional landscapes and the physical world that surrounds us.

This exhibition coincided with Hayward Gallery’s 50th Anniversary in July. In her ambitious site-specific installation Weep into stones (2017–18), Lee Bul responded to both the fabric of the Hayward and its radical design by draping the gallery in a shimmering curtain of fine steel wire, crystal and glass.

The Lee Bul exhibition was generously supported by The Korea Foundation, Swarovski and The Henry Moore Foundation.