Lee Bul opens her first exhibition at Hauser & Wirth with a giant airship over New York

South Korean artist Lee Bul has landed at the Hauser & Wirth gallery in New York with a work that is hard to ignore: a monumental airship of gleaming metal, suspended in the air in the heart of the exhibition hall. The exhibition, titled “The Anatomy of Every Setting Sun”, is the artist’s first collaboration with the prestigious gallery and will stay open until 24 October 2026, as USA Art News reports.

The central installation, “Willing To Be Vulnerable — Metalized Balloon” (2015–2016/2020), dominates one of the gallery’s halls in Chelsea. A hidden electric blower keeps the chrome dirigible inflated, while mirrors around it display images of headless figures on unicycles. The work is built from PET — also known as Mylar — a material the artist chose for its silvery reflective sheen, lightness and durability.

For Lee Bul, the airship is a powerful emblem of the aspirations and failures of modernity, evoking the “Golden Age of Airships” of the 1920s and 1930s, when countries such as Germany, the United States, Great Britain and France competed over rigid airship technology before finally abandoning it.

The exhibition coincides with a major mid-career survey of the artist, “Lee Bul: From 1998 to Now”, which opens next month at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Antwerp, after stops at the Leeum Museum in Seoul and M+ in Hong Kong. Among the new works in New York is also the painting “A.Q. Ver. L. #2” (2026), an intricate work on velvet with acrylic and cut mother-of-pearl, which can take months or even years to complete.

Curated by art historian Jiyoon Lee, the exhibition links the works with utopian visions — from architect Bruno Taut’s “Alpine Architektur” manifesto (1919) to Tommaso Campanella’s “The City of the Sun” (1602). The exhibition also includes large-scale sculptures that expand the artist’s 2024 commission for the façade of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, according to USA Art News.