In her first exhibition with Hauser & Wirth, Lee Bul brings monumental sculptures, mother-of-pearl paintings, and hybrid architectural forms to West Chelsea, confronting the beauty and instability of humanity’s technological dreams.

In Lee Bul’s art, the future rarely arrives intact.

It floats.

It fragments.

It shines beautifully before revealing the cracks beneath the surface.

At Hauser & Wirth’s West Chelsea gallery, the Korean artist presents The Anatomy of Every Setting Sun, an exhibition that brings together major new sculptures and recent bodies of work examining one of the defining questions of her four-decade practice: what happens when humanity’s desire to transcend nature becomes another form of vulnerability?

On view September 10 through October 24, 2026, the exhibition is the artist’s first presentation with Hauser & Wirth. Organized by guest curator Dr. Jiyoon Lee, it brings together sculpture, painting, architecture, technology, and organic materials in an environment where utopian ambition repeatedly encounters collapse.

The exhibition occupies Hauser & Wirth’s five-story West Chelsea building at 542 West 22nd Street, designed by Selldorf Architects.

A Zeppelin Suspended Between Progress and Ruin

The first encounter is difficult to ignore.

Floating above the ground-floor gallery is Willing To Be Vulnerable—Metalized Balloon (2015–2016/2020), a massive zeppelin-like sculpture constructed from lightweight materials including PET film.

The form immediately recalls one of modernity’s great symbols: the airship.

The technological dream of conquering distance.

The fantasy of leaving the ground.

The promise that engineering might allow humanity to overcome physical limitations.

But Lee Bul’s version is not a triumphant monument.

It is fragile.

Suspended in space, the sculpture seems simultaneously futuristic and archaeological—as if an object from an imagined civilization has survived after the civilization itself has disappeared.

Hauser & Wirth describes the work as occupying a space between monument and ruin, turning the historical symbolism of technological progress toward questions of impermanence and vulnerability.

That tension becomes the conceptual foundation for the exhibition.

The Future Is Built From Contradictions

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

Her practice emerged internationally during the 1990s through provocative sculptures, installations and performances that explored technology, gender, the body, beauty, corruption and decay.

Her celebrated Cyborgs and Anagrams series examined fantasies of technological perfection and the possibility of transforming the human body.

But her work gradually expanded beyond the cyborg itself.

Architecture entered the conversation.

So did ruins.

So did the history of political and technological utopianism.

The artist’s biography is also important to this development. Lee Bul grew up in South Korea during a period of major political and social transformation and is the daughter of political dissidents. Her later work repeatedly returned to the rise and collapse of projects promising to construct a better civilization.

The result is not simply dystopian art.

Lee Bul’s sculptures remain seductive.

They glitter.

They float.

They resemble machines, bodies, buildings and futuristic monuments.

Their attraction is precisely what makes their instability meaningful.

Mother-of-Pearl Futures

Some of the exhibition’s most intricate works come from Lee Bul’s ongoing Untitled (Willing To Be Vulnerable—Velvet) series.

The new paintings begin with photographs of the artist’s own sculptures and installations. Lee then layers source imagery, fragments of studio materials and carefully cut pieces of mother-of-pearl onto rich silk velvet grounds.

The resulting surfaces are luminous and densely constructed.

Architectural forms seem to crystallize out of darkness.

Some resemble futuristic cities.

Others evoke fragments of machines, organisms or unidentified structures.

The materials themselves create a contradiction.

Silk velvet and mother-of-pearl have biological origins, while acrylic belongs to the industrial world. Together they produce an environment where the organic and synthetic become difficult to separate.

The works therefore continue Lee Bul’s interest in hybridization—but the cyborg has effectively expanded into an entire landscape.

The body becomes architecture.

Architecture becomes organism.

Technology becomes nature.

And nature becomes material for imagining the future.

Painting That Behaves Like Sculpture

The exhibition’s Perdu works push that transformation further.

Mother-of-pearl is embedded within multiple layers of acrylic paint, which are repeatedly applied and sanded. The process gradually exposes shifting surfaces that catch and reflect light.

The physical labor is slow and cumulative.

A surface is built.

Then partially erased.

Then rebuilt.

The final image retains traces of that process.

The newest Perdu works move increasingly toward abstract architectural landscapes, extending the artist’s investigation into modernity and its unfinished promises.

This is painting that refuses to remain purely pictorial.

Its surface has memory.

Light changes it.

Distance changes it.

Movement changes it.

The viewer does not simply read the image; they experience the material construction of the image.

From the Met to West Chelsea

Several of the exhibition’s new large-scale sculptures develop ideas first explored in Lee Bul’s 2024 commission Long Tail Halo for the Fifth Avenue façade of The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

That project placed Lee’s hybrid sculptural language directly onto one of New York’s most recognizable cultural buildings.

At Hauser & Wirth, the ideas become more concentrated.

The new sculptures combine bodily, mechanical and architectural forms. Their silhouettes can suggest organisms, machines, fragments of buildings, or monuments from an imaginary civilization.

They are neither completely futuristic nor historical.

They occupy an unstable middle ground.

That ambiguity is essential to Lee Bul’s practice.

A monument normally promises permanence.

Her monuments often suggest the possibility of their own disappearance.

Beauty, Decay, and the Failure of Perfect Systems

The title The Anatomy of Every Setting Sun carries an appropriate sense of inevitability.

A setting sun is beautiful precisely because it is temporary.

Light becomes darkness.

Day becomes night.

Completion contains disappearance.

Lee Bul’s sculptures operate through similar reversals.

Technological progress becomes fragility.

Monument becomes ruin.

Utopia becomes melancholy.

The organic becomes mechanical.

The mechanical becomes bodily.

Her art does not necessarily reject technological ambition. Instead, it asks viewers to examine what technological ambition leaves behind.

What happens when systems designed to create perfection produce new forms of limitation?

What happens when architecture intended to symbolize progress becomes evidence of a civilization’s anxiety?

And what happens when the desire to escape nature ultimately produces increasingly complicated relationships with it?

These questions give the exhibition its intellectual weight.

Lee Bul’s New York Moment

The Chelsea presentation arrives at an important point in the artist’s international career.

Her work is held in major collections including The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, Tate Modern in London, the British Museum, M+ Hong Kong, Mori Art Museum in Tokyo, and Leeum Museum of Art in Seoul.

The Hauser & Wirth exhibition also precedes Lee Bul: From 1998 to Now, a major traveling survey scheduled to open at the Museum of Contemporary Art Antwerp on November 13, 2026.

In that context, The Anatomy of Every Setting Sun functions not simply as another gallery exhibition, but as a concentrated look at an artist whose central concerns have remained remarkably consistent while her materials and forms have continually evolved.

The Ruins of Tomorrow

Lee Bul’s imagined futures are compelling because they never feel completely imaginary.

They contain recognizable ambitions: technological mastery, architectural grandeur, bodily transformation, engineered perfection.

But they also contain the evidence of failure.

That duality makes The Anatomy of Every Setting Sun especially resonant in contemporary New York.

The city itself is filled with monuments to technological confidence—skyscrapers, transportation systems, glass towers, digital infrastructures and constantly rebuilt urban landscapes.

Lee Bul places a different kind of monument in their midst.

One that floats.

One that fractures.

One that looks beautiful enough to trust and fragile enough to question.

At Hauser & Wirth, the future is not presented as a destination.

It is presented as an unfinished structure.

And perhaps that is the most powerful idea in Lee Bul’s new work: every vision of tomorrow already contains the possibility of its own setting sun.