Lee Bul Floats Giant Airship In Hauser & Wirth Debut Show

(MENAFN- USA Art News) Artist Lee Bul has unveiled a monumental airship as the centerpiece of her inaugural exhibition with Hauser & Wirth in New York. The show, titled“The Anatomy of Every Setting Sun,” marks a significant moment in the South Korean artist's career.

The installation, called Willing To Be Vulnerable-Metalized Balloon (2015–2016/2020), dominates one of the gallery's rooms in Chelsea. A subtle hum from an electric blower keeps the chrome dirigible inflated, while nearby mirrors display images of headless figures on unicycles. The airship is crafted from PET, also known as Mylar, a material Lee chose for its reflective silver finish, lightness, and durability.

For Lee, the airship serves as a potent emblem of modernity's aspirations and failures, evoking the“Golden Age of Airships” of the 1920s and 1930s, when nations like Germany, the United States, the United Kingdom, and France pursued rigid airship technology before abandoning it.

This exhibition coincides with a major mid-career survey,“Lee Bul: From 1998 to Now,” which will open at the Museum of Contemporary Art Antwerp next month. That retrospective has already made stops at the Leeum Museum of Art in Seoul and M+ in Hong Kong. An airship is also featured in the Antwerp presentation, alongside works exploring technology, women's bodies, and notions of progress.

New works in the Hauser & Wirth show include a rigid airship appearing in A.Q. Ver. L. #2 (2026), an intricate velvet painting. These pieces, which can take months to years to complete, often start with photographs of Lee's sculptures and incorporate acrylic and cut mother-of-pearl on velvet. Additional new works from her“Perdu” series utilize similar distinctive materials.

Curated by art historian Jiyoon Lee, the exhibition draws connections between Lee's practice and utopian visions. An essay by Jiyoon Lee highlights the influence of German architect Bruno Taut's 1919 manifesto, Alpine Architektur, which envisioned crystalline glass temples on mountain peaks. Another key reference is Italian philosopher and theologian Tommaso Campanella's The City of the Sun (1602), an early utopian text.

Lee's approach aligns with this conceptual tradition, studying the interplay between painting and sculpture, the organic and the artificial, and hypothetical utopian architecture. Her work avoids didacticism, instead presenting possibilities, much like her suspended airship, in the face of global challenges such as AI, climate change, and geopolitical competition.

The show also features large-scale sculptures that expand on Lee's 2024 commission of cyborg-like figures for the facade of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Lee emphasizes viewing these sculptures from multiple perspectives, as they can shift between appearing as human or robotic forms.

“Lee Bul. The Anatomy of Every Setting Sun” is on view at Hauser & Wirth, New York, West 22nd Street, through October 24, 2026.

Source: Artnet News

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