In 2021, the Seoul Museum of Art presented a Lee Bul exhibition under a seemingly self-explanatory title, “Beginning.” The show offered an extensive selection of the Korean artist’s early works—from her iconic performances (or more precisely, their documentation) to sculptures, installations, and archival materials. Though the 10-year survey, covering the late 1980s to the late 1990s, risked narrowly framing Lee’s practice as feminist spectacle, it nonetheless offered a timely vantage point, coming after “Crashing” (a 30-year roundup at the Hayward Gallery, London, 2018) and “Utopia Saved” (focusing on works from 2005–20 at The Manege, St. Petersburg, 2020), while anticipating “Lee Bul: From 1998 to Now,” slated to appear at the Leeum Museum of Art, Seoul, in September this year, and at M+, Hong Kong, in 2026.
Lee’s practice has often…