Lee Bul transforms Hayward Gallery, London, into a spectacular dream-like landscape featuring monstrous bodies, futuristic cyborgs, glittering mirrored environments and an exquisitely surreal monumental foil Zeppelin.
Installation view of Monster: Black, 2011 and Civitas Solis II, 2014
Bringing together more than 100 works from the late 1980s to the present day, this exhibition explores 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’.
Via Negativa II (interior detail), 2014. © Lee Bul 2018. Courtesy: Lehmann Maupin Gallery, New York and Hong Kong. Photo: Mark Blower
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.
Installation view of Willing To Be Vulnerable – Metalized Balloon, 2015-16 at Hayward Gallery, 2018. © Lee Bul, Photo: Linda Nylind
This exhibition coincides with Hayward Gallery’s 50th Anniversary in July. In her ambitious site-specific installation “Weep into stones” (2017–18), Lee Bul responds 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.
Installation view of Crashing at Hayward Gallery © Lee Bul 2018. Photo by Linda Nylind
The Lee Bul exhibition is generously supported by The Korea Foundation, Swarovski and The Henry Moore Foundation.
Cyborg W1-W4, 1998. Photo: Yoon Hyung-moon / Courtesy: Studio Lee Bul
Lee Bul
01.06.2018 – 19.08.2018
Image 1: Majestic Splendor, 1991-2018, installation view, Hayward Gallery, 2018. Courtesy of Lee Bul. Photograph: Linda Nylind
Discover: www.southbankcentre.co.uk
