Lee Bul:
Early Performances
Lee Bul:
Early Performances
Lee Bul is one of the most important contemporary artists of her generation. She made a sensational debut in the late 1980s through performance, body art, and textile-based soft sculptures. As part of the current Special Exhibition Lee Bul: From 1998 to Now, a complementary screening programme featuring four performance documentaries offers a rare opportunity to trace the early developments of Lee’s artistic journey.
These early groundbreaking performances showcase intertwined ideas of the female body, everyday materials, and bodily sculptures, which would seed the subsequent thinking behind her larger body of sculptural and installation-based works currently on view at the West Galleries on Level 2.
This screening programme, curated to contextualise the exhibition, is free of charge, with drop-ins welcome starting from 14 March 2026 at House 3, M+ Cinema. Screenings run continuously every Tuesday through Sunday from 10:30 in the morning.
Photograph of Abortion, 1989, performance at the 1st Korea and Japan Performance Festival, Lobby Theatre, Dongsoong Art Center, Seoul, 1989. © Lee Bul. Courtesy of the artist
Photograph of Cravings, 1988, outdoor performance at Jangheung, Gyeonggi-do, 1988. © Lee Bul. Courtesy of the artist
Photograph of Sorry for suffering–You think I'm a puppy on a picnic?, 1990, a twelve-day performance at the 2nd Japan and Korea Performance Festival, Gimpo Airport, Seoul; Narita Airport; Meiji Shrine, Harajuku, Otemachi Station, Koganji Temple, Asakusa, Shibuya, the University of Tokyo, and Tokiwaza Theater, Tokyo, Japan, 1990. © Lee Bul. Courtesy of the artist
Photograph of Untitled, 1993, performance at the 1st Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, 1993. © Lee Bul. Courtesy of Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane
Photograph of Abortion, 1989, performance at the 1st Korea and Japan Performance Festival, Lobby Theatre, Dongsoong Art Center, Seoul, 1989. © Lee Bul. Courtesy of the artist
Photograph of Cravings, 1988, outdoor performance at Jangheung, Gyeonggi-do, 1988. © Lee Bul. Courtesy of the artist
Photograph of Sorry for suffering–You think I'm a puppy on a picnic?, 1990, a twelve-day performance at the 2nd Japan and Korea Performance Festival, Gimpo Airport, Seoul; Narita Airport; Meiji Shrine, Harajuku, Otemachi Station, Koganji Temple, Asakusa, Shibuya, the University of Tokyo, and Tokiwaza Theater, Tokyo, Japan, 1990. © Lee Bul. Courtesy of the artist
Photograph of Untitled, 1993, performance at the 1st Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, 1993. © Lee Bul. Courtesy of Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane
About the Artist
Lee Bul (b. 1964, South Korea) is widely recognised as the foremost Korean artist of her generation. Educated in Seoul, she broke with her academic training to establish her early reputation with provocative genre- and discipline-crossing works exploring themes of the female body, beauty, and decay. Since the early 2000s, her work has engaged with themes of utopian modernity, the historical avant-garde in art and architecture, and the rise and fall of ideas aimed at reinventing the world.
Lee’s works have been showcased in major institutions across the world, including the Seoul Museum of Art; Martin Gropius Bau, Berlin; and the Hayward Gallery, London. In 2024, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, invited Lee to create sculptures for the niches of the museum’s Fifth Avenue facade, as part of the Genesis Facade Commission; the project was titled Lee Bul: Long Tail Halo.
Image at top: Photograph of Sorry for suffering–You think I'm a puppy on a picnic?, 1990, a twelve-day performance at the 2nd Japan and Korea Performance Festival, Gimpo Airport, Seoul; Narita Airport; Meiji Shrine, Harajuku, Otemachi Station, Koganji Temple, Asakusa, Shibuya, the University of Tokyo, and Tokiwaza Theater, Tokyo, Japan, 1990. © Lee Bul. Courtesy of the artist