PKM Gallery presents the solo exhibition of Lee Bul, one of Korea’s representative contemporary artists. This exhibition, featuring more than 10 new sculptures and drawings, is her first solo exhibition in Korea since her last exhibition at PKM Gallery in 2010.

Since the late 1980s, Lee Bul has been delivering her thoughts on social issues through various mediums such as performance art, sculptures, installations, paintings, and drawings, captivating the praise of critics and creating pieces with a profound aesthetic appeal. She rose to fame after involving her own body in performances that denounced the social exploitation of women. The decorative usage of marbles and beads in her handmade performance outfits symbolized femininity to emphasize her point. Lee Bul, who had been directly communicating with her audience through her performances, unveiled the new series Cyborg in the late 1990s, distancing herself from her audience and widening the horizons of her work into more subtle and metaphorical sculptures.

The Cyborg series, which began the exploration of themes such as reality and idealism, was followed by the Mon Grand Récit series, a work embodying human aspiration towards a utopian society, and the Infinity series, a subset of Mon Grand Récit. These works are equally decorative and architectural, allowing the audience to directly interact with the works, and suggest both macroscopic and microscopic viewpoints. The LED lights, mirror shards, and crystals used in the Infinity series provide visual pleasure as well as provoking introspection on the future and humanity itself, bringing the work to a more erudite conclusion.

The new works retain the vast illusion of space pulled forth by infinitely mirroring images seen in the artist’s previous Infinity series, but the addition of hanging crystal pieces with double-sided mirrors and LED lights brings renewed beauty to the works. In the Infinity series, figures reminiscent of futuristic cityscapes are repeated ad infinitum in the mirrors, reflecting humanity’s yearning for immortality; the series was shown to much critical acclaim in the artist’s retrospective at the Mori Art Museum in 2012, and a piece from the series made entirely of Swarovski crystals is currently installed in the Swarovski Kristallwelten in Austria. Last year, Lee Bul was designated as the first artist for the Hyundai Motors Project at the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Seoul, where a massive installation of hers was shown.

Lee Bul, who majored in sculpture at Hongik University, has held solo exhibitions at the MoMA in New York, the New Museum in New York, the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain in Paris, and the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Seoul. Her solo exhibitions have been touring the world, beginning at the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo, followed by the MUDAM in Luxembourg and the EACC in Spain, to arrive in the Vancouver Art Gallery in Canada opening this October. Additional plans have been made to display her projects at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, also for this October. Her works are currently shown in collections at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York and the Tate Modern in London. She has received the Special Award at the 48th Venice Biennale, the Kim Se Joong Sculpture Award and Noon Award at the 10th Gwangju Biennale, among others, and her works are included in the collections of numerous highly-reputed art institutions such as the Leeum, Samsung Museum of Art in Seoul, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in Los Angeles, the Tate Modern in London, and the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo.