Press Release

For the 2024 Facade Commission, South Korean artist Lee Bul (born 1964, Yeongju, based in Seoul) will create four new sculptures that combine figurative and abstract elements for The Met Fifth Avenue’s facade niches. The commission will be Lee’s first major project in the United States in over 20 years. The Facade Commission: Lee Bul will be the fifth in the series of contemporary commissions for The Met’s facade.

With a career that spans four decades, Lee is widely recognized as the preeminent artist from South Korea. She is known for her sophisticated use of both highly industrial and labor-intensive materials, such as fabric, metal, plastic, silicone, porcelain, and glass, incorporating artisanal practices as well as technological advancements into her work. Her sculptures, often evoking bodily forms that are at once classical and futuristic, address the aspirations and disillusions that come with progress.

The Facade Commission is part of The Met’s series of contemporary commissions in which the Museum invites artists to create new works of art, establishing a dialogue between the artist’s practice, The Met collection, the physical Museum, and The Met’s audiences.

The commission is made possible in part by Cynthia Hazen Polsky and Leon B. Polsky.

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About the Artist

Lee Bul (b. 1964, Yeongju, South Korea) works across performance, sculpture, drawing, painting, installation, architecture, and video. Her work engages themes of utopian and dystopian imagination, technological transformation, modernity’s failures, and the fragility of human ambition, often through cyborg bodies, architectural fragments, and speculative landscapes. She lives and works in Seoul and is widely regarded as one of the most influential artists of her generation.

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About the Gallery

The Metropolitan Museum of Art (The Met) is one of the world’s most well-loved landmark museums located on Fifth Avenue along Central Park’s Museum Mile in Manhattan, New York. Renowned for its monumental Beaux-Arts architecture and encyclopedic collection, it also presents an exceptional showing of contemporary art.

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