Lee Bul, Long Tail Halo The Met Facade Commission 2024
The acclaimed South Korean artist Lee Bul (born 1964, Yeongju; based in Seoul) has transformed the iconic niches of the Museum’s Fifth Avenue facade with a suite of four new works that challenges what sculptures can reveal about our times. Responding to the facade as a site for statues, Lee’s towering sculptures are at once classical and contemporary, forthcoming and elusive. This arresting ambiguity, expressed through amalgamated bodily, mechanical, and architectural archetypes and personal and collective memories, explores how history can be admired as well as destabilised. The Genesis Facade Commission: Lee Bul, Long Tail Halo marks Lee’s first major project in the United States in over 20 years.
“Lee Bul’s extraordinary sculptures explore the complexities of the human condition through powerful, hybrid forms that draw from the past while speaking to present day hopes and anxieties about the future,” said Max Hollein, The Met’s Marina Kellen French Director and Chief Executive Officer. “This commission series invites artists to engage with, transform, and even challenge The Met’s iconic Fifth Avenue facade, and we’re tremendously excited to see Lee’s works now unveiled.”
Lee Bul said, “My hope is that a personal connection and resonance will be created between the public, the artwork, and the architecture.”
Lee’s commission comprises four sculptures made of EVA or polycarbonate parts over steel armatures. Long Tail Halo: CTCS #1 and Long Tail Halo: CTCS #2 flank the Museum entrance and their human-like forms recall Cubist and Futurist masterpieces, scholar’s rocks, Greco-Roman classics, and historical armors in The Met collection. Similarly abstract, Long Tail Halo: Secret Sharer II and Long Tail Halo: Secret Sharer III each hunch over a cascade of fragmented prisms; their behavior evokes the artist’s pets who acted as her guardians. The works, independently and in dialogue, symbolize the abiding human desire for progress and perfection while hinting at the failures and repercussions inherent to these pursuits. Together they reflect the endless revisions and transformations in the long narratives of history.
About the Artist
Lee Bul is a leading artist of her generation who works across a diverse range of media—from drawing, sculpture, and painting to performance, installation, and video—to examine themes of beauty, desire, corruption, and decay. The Genesis Facade Commission is Lee’s first major project in the United States since her solo exhibition at the New Museum in New York in 2002. Lee represented South Korea at the 48th Venice Biennale in 1999 and received her country’s prestigious Ho-Am Prize in 2019. Major retrospectives of her work were held at the Hayward Gallery, London (2018) and the Seoul Museum of Art (2021). Another will open at the Leeum Museum, Seoul in 2025 and travel to M+, Hong Kong.
Since her breakthrough performances in the late 1980s in Seoul and Tokyo wearing sewn sculptural forms, Lee has been heralded as a pioneer in contemporary sculpture and installation. She is most known for her sculptural figures and landscapes that use industrial materials and labor-intensive process and blur the boundaries between the organic and the artificial. Sensuous yet fragmented, these dramatic constructions critique progress-driven, perfection-obsessed values through transformations of familiar forms. Lee’s structurally and visually complex work also explores the aspirations and failures of utopian visions and exposes a sense of vulnerability and melancholy in history.
