Antwerp’s M HKA will open Lee Bul: From 1998 to Now, later this year, 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, starting on 13 November, 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 and Leeum Museum of Art in Seoul, 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 202
Lee Bul 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.
Commenting, 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, told this site: “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.”
June Young Kwak, Head of Exhibitions at Leeum Museum of Art and exhibition co-curator: “Through her tireless passion and ever-evolving artistic practice, Lee Bul has reflected on humanity’s past and present while offering a compelling vision of possible futures. The exhibition unfolds as an unpredictable landscape where autobiographical memories, historical narratives, and sociopolitical contexts intertwine, inviting visitors into open-ended, multilayered encounters with her artistic 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.
n 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.
