Lee Bul's first exhibition with Hauser & Wirth has opened in New York, with a monumental airship as its centrepiece. The Anatomy of Every Setting Sun, on view at the gallery's West 22nd Street space through 24 October, marks a pivotal moment for the South Korean artist as she joins the mega-gallery's roster. The show's anchor is Willing To Be Vulnerable—Metalized Balloon (2015–2016/2020), a massive chrome dirigible kept inflated by an electric blower inside a mirrored room. Nearby mirrors carry images of headless figures on unicycles, lending the installation a surreal, spectral quality. The vessel is made of PET, a lightweight and highly reflective material the artist chose for its silvery finish, and reads as a monument to the airships of the 1920s and 1930s — symbols, for Lee, of modernity's promises and failures. New velvet paintings continue an ongoing series in which photographs of the artist's own sculptures become intricate collages of acrylic and cut mother-of-pearl on richly hued velvet, each taking months or years to complete. Works from the Perdu series use similarly idiosyncratic materials, while a suite of large-scale sculptures develops the cyborg-like figures Lee created for the Metropolitan Museum of Art's facade commission in 2024. The show is curated by art historian Jiyoon Lee. The exhibition arrives at a busy moment in Lee's career. A major mid-career survey, Lee Bul: From 1998 to Now, opens next month at the Museum of Contemporary Art Antwerp, following presentations at the Leeum Museum of Art in Seoul and M+ in Hong Kong. The artist's long-standing concerns — technology, women's bodies and the idea of progress — run through both the Chelsea show and the travelling survey.