“Lee Bul: From 1998 to Now” is at Leeum Museum, Seoul, through January 4, 2026. Photo: Jeon Byung-cheol. Courtesy of Leeum Museum of Art

From her earliest beginnings in the late 1980s, when she rose to prominence with body-based performances aimed at scandalizing South Korea’s patriarchal respectability, Lee Bul established herself as one of the country’s most provocative contemporary artists—not only for pushing the boundaries between mediums but also for her unfiltered artistic experiments, which doubled as political gestures against the contradictions of Korea’s conservative society and of our time. From those early performances exposing the female condition in a post-dictatorship, male-dominated South Korea, she moved in the 1990s toward futuristic soft sculptures and cyborg forms, merging eroticism, technology and dystopian critique. The result is a pioneering, visionary and often cryptic multimedia lexicon that seems to belong to a future dimension, already estranged from the tragedies and issues of our present.

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While the artist rarely accepts interviews, Observer secured one on the occasion of her milestone career survey, “Lee Bul: from 1988 to Now,” which recently opened at Leeum Museum alongside Frieze Seoul and runs through January 4, 2025. When the answers arrived, I was hardly surprised by the cryptic language she used—closer to divinatory epigrams from a future cyborg version of herself than to conventional responses—yet they were profoundly illuminating, echoing the truths already woven into the exhibition. Her reaction to our questions confirmed I was, at least, on the right path: “Please let the writer know that she is such an insightful viewer that my response may be unnecessary,” she wrote. “The questions reflect my intentions, so I am confident she will understand my perspective. If my responses are used for a review, these keywords alone should sufficiently convey my thoughts.”

When I visited her studio a few years ago during the first edition of Frieze Seoul, it was evident that Bul was not one for many words. Like most visionaries, she follows images and intuitions that demand translation into forms already ahead of, or beyond, the reach of codification and language. Her studio is less a workplace than a laboratory of matter in motion—a maze of maquettes, drawings and studies, where fragments of ideas find new reassemblies and mutations in a potentially endless process of interrogation, signification and visualization.

Fresh off her Met Facade Commission in New York, Bul’s exhibition at the Leeum Museum presents an expansive journey through the many phases of her futuristic “Grand Narrative.” Co-curated with M , it is the most comprehensive survey of her career to date, spanning........

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