Installation View. Road Movie: Korean and Japanese Art after 1945, National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Gwacheon, Korea, 2026.
Road Movie: Art Between Korea and Japan Since 1945 | National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Gwacheon, Korea
May 14 – September 27, 2026
Lee Bul’s Cyborg W5 (1999) and 47 early drawings are featured in Road Movie: Korean and Japanese Art after 1945, a major exhibition co-organized by the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea, and the Yokohama Museum of Art.
Celebrating the 60th anniversary of the normalization of diplomatic relations between Korea and Japan, the exhibition sheds light on the artistic dialogue between the two countries from 1945 to the present through more than 200 works by 43 artists, including such pivotal figures as Nam June Paik, Park Seo-bo, Lee Ufan, Tanaka Koki, and Takamatsu Jiro.
On view alongside forty-seven drawings, Cyborg W5 belongs to Lee’s seminal Cyborg series, in which human and machine converge in speculative bodily forms. Combining idealized and fragmented anatomies, the work reflects on the promises and anxieties of technological modernity while proposing new possibilities beyond fixed notions of gender, identity, and the human body.
