In West Chelsea, Lee Bul turns technological ambition into floating monuments, fractured architectures, and luminous surfaces where utopian dreams collide with fragility.

A futuristic airship hovers above the gallery floor.

It looks impossibly light, almost weightless, yet its form carries the historical burden of one of modernity’s most recognizable symbols: the technological dream of conquering distance and overcoming nature.

This is Willing To Be Vulnerable—Metalized Balloon (2015–2016/2020), the monumental centerpiece of Lee Bul’s The Anatomy of Every Setting Sun at Hauser & Wirth in West Chelsea.

The exhibition, on view from September 10 through October 24, 2026, is Lee Bul’s first solo presentation with Hauser & Wirth. Organized by guest curator Dr. Jiyoon Lee, it brings together major new sculptures and recent bodies of work examining humanity’s attempts to transcend nature through technology, systems of control, architecture, and visions of the future.

Rather than presenting the future as a clean technological paradise, Lee Bul gives it cracks.

Her sculptures look futuristic and familiar at once—part machine, part organism, part architectural fragment. They suggest monuments from civilizations that have not yet existed, while simultaneously appearing like ruins from a future that has already collapsed.

The Airship as a Fragile Monument

Suspended in the ground-floor space of Hauser & Wirth’s five-story West Chelsea building, Willing To Be Vulnerable—Metalized Balloon immediately establishes the exhibition’s central tension.

The zeppelin-like sculpture is fabricated from lightweight materials including PET film. Its enormous form appears almost delicate as it floats above the viewer.

The airship historically represented technological optimism.

It promised mobility.

It represented engineering overcoming geography.

It suggested a future in which humans could move through the atmosphere with unprecedented freedom.

Lee Bul transforms that symbolism.

Her airship does not communicate technological mastery so much as technological vulnerability.

It is suspended, exposed, and strangely precarious.

The title makes the contradiction explicit: to become technologically powerful is not necessarily to become invulnerable.

The sculpture occupies the psychological space between monument and ruin—a distinction that runs throughout Lee Bul’s work.

Utopia Always Has a Shadow

Lee Bul has spent decades examining the promises and failures of modernity.

Her interdisciplinary practice encompasses sculpture, installation, performance, and painting, with her work since the 1990s repeatedly questioning technological transformation, utopian ideals, the body, and the fragility of human ambition.

The new exhibition continues that investigation without simply repeating earlier forms.

Instead, Lee Bul develops a visual vocabulary in which organic and technological structures become increasingly difficult to separate.

The new sculptures resemble fragments of machines and buildings, but their forms also suggest bodies, organisms, bones, shells, or biological growth.

The result is an architecture without a stable category.

Is it alive?

Is it engineered?

Is it a monument?

Is it debris?

The uncertainty is intentional.

From Cyborgs to Hybrid Architecture

Lee Bul first became internationally recognized during the 1990s for work that challenged conventional boundaries between the human body and technology.

Her Cyborg sculptures became particularly influential for their hybrid forms—beautiful, damaged, fragmented bodies that imagined technological enhancement while exposing its limitations.

Three decades later, the body has expanded into architecture.

The new CTCS sculptures continue this transformation.

Works including CTCS #5 and CTCS #6 combine stainless steel, extruded polystyrene, carbon fiber, urethane foam, epoxy, and acrylic varnish.

These materials belong unmistakably to the contemporary industrial world.

Yet their assembled forms are not purely mechanical.

They appear strangely biological.

They seem capable of transformation.

They could be architectural fragments, futuristic vehicles, skeletal structures, or unknown organisms.

The ambiguity creates one of the exhibition’s most compelling questions:

What might architecture look like if it behaved like a body?

The Velvet Works: Painting as Ruin

The exhibition’s sculptural language continues into Lee Bul’s paintings.

New works from the Untitled (Willing To Be Vulnerable—Velvet) series combine mother-of-pearl, acrylic paint, collage, and silk velvet. The gallery notes that these works can take months—and sometimes years—to complete.

The materials create a striking contradiction.

Mother-of-pearl is organic and iridescent.

Velvet is soft and tactile.

Acrylic and collage introduce industrial and constructed elements.

Together, they create surfaces that shimmer between landscape, architecture, diagram, and abstraction.

One example, Untitled (Willing To Be Vulnerable—Velvet #29 (2026), measures 180 by 130 centimeters and combines mother-of-pearl, acrylic paint, and collage on silk velvet.

The visual effect is almost geological.

The surface seems to contain a city, a machine, and a natural formation simultaneously.

It is painting that behaves like an object.

From Perdu to the Abstract Landscape

Lee Bul’s ongoing Perdu works have also evolved.

Earlier works drew from the biomorphic vocabulary of her sculptures. In the newest examples, that language moves toward increasingly abstract architectural landscapes.

Perdu-Silhouette I (2026), for example, uses mother-of-pearl and acrylic paint on jute canvas with an aluminum base panel and stainless-steel frame.

Again, the material contradiction is important.

Jute suggests something raw and organic.

Aluminum and stainless steel suggest industrial construction.

Mother-of-pearl introduces a luminous natural material.

The artwork becomes a meeting point between these worlds.

Rather than depicting a future city, Lee Bul constructs a surface that feels like the memory of one.

The Legacy of Long Tail Halo

The exhibition’s new monumental sculptures also develop ideas Lee Bul explored in Long Tail Halo, her 2024 commission for the Fifth Avenue façade of The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

That earlier project brought her hybrid sculptural language into direct dialogue with one of New York’s most recognizable cultural institutions.

At Hauser & Wirth, those ideas become more concentrated and immersive.

The new sculptures fuse bodily, mechanical, and architectural forms, continuing Lee Bul’s examination of monuments as expressions of social power.

But the monuments here do not look stable.

They look provisional.

They seem to have been assembled from pieces of an unknown civilization.

Their surfaces and structures suggest both construction and decomposition.

This is architecture after certainty.

Modernity Without a Happy Ending

The title The Anatomy of Every Setting Sun provides another key to the exhibition.

A setting sun represents beauty, but also inevitable transition.

Light becomes darkness.

Completion becomes disappearance.

A day ends.

Lee Bul’s art operates through similar reversals.

Technological progress contains vulnerability.

Utopia contains failure.

Monument contains ruin.

Human ambition contains limits.

The exhibition does not argue that technology itself is inherently destructive. Instead, it examines the complicated relationship between technological aspiration and the desire to control nature.

Hauser & Wirth describes the exhibition as exploring the tensions between utopian aspiration and inevitable collapse, while exposing the entanglement of technology, history, and nature.

That distinction matters.

Lee Bul is not simply imagining dystopia.

She is examining why humans repeatedly imagine perfection in the first place.

A Major New York Moment

The Chelsea exhibition arrives at an important point in Lee Bul’s career.

It follows the artist’s major traveling survey Lee Bul: From 1998 to Now, which was presented at Leeum Museum of Art in Seoul and M+ in Hong Kong and is scheduled to open at the Museum of Contemporary Art Antwerp on November 13, 2026.

The New York exhibition therefore offers a concentrated view of an artist whose practice has evolved dramatically while retaining a consistent concern with modernity and the human desire to exceed its limitations.

Her forms have changed.

The questions have remained.

The Future as a Ruin

Walking through The Anatomy of Every Setting Sun, it becomes difficult to separate the future from the past.

A futuristic structure looks archaeological.

A technological object looks organic.

A painting resembles a landscape.

A sculpture resembles a body.

A monument appears ready to collapse.

That instability is the point.

Lee Bul creates futures that do not arrive cleanly. They emerge as fragments—beautiful, complicated, damaged, and unresolved.

In an era increasingly defined by artificial intelligence, automation, biotechnology, surveillance, and rapidly accelerating technological systems, her decades-long investigation into the relationship between humanity and technology acquires renewed relevance.

Yet the exhibition does not offer a prediction.

It offers an anatomy.

The anatomy of ambition.

The anatomy of progress.

The anatomy of vulnerability.

And, ultimately, the anatomy of the setting sun.

At Hauser & Wirth, Lee Bul reminds us that every vision of a perfect future contains something fragile inside it.

The monument may survive—but the dream that built it is never guaranteed to.