Mire Lee

Mire Lee (b. Korea, 1988) is known to create kinetic sculptural installations that appear shabby, ridiculous, and precarious. Lee questions human fantasies of technologies that contradict the realities of subjects that decay and deform through time. Lee’s work challenges notions of selfhood, social acceptability, and cleanliness; obliterating societal conventions of aesthetics and desire in the face of her orgasmic, transgressive and kinetic technologies. Towels, chains, clay, silicon hoses, and steel structures coalesce to form an organism that is haptic, primordial, and yet highly mechanized. Lee’s works engage the senses in a visceral way, outside the realm of intellect and language.

In works like Carriers, tentacular appendages amidst a milky rain of glycerin activate a sense of deeply personal indiscretion within the viewer, their projections of vorarephilia functioning as an emblem of solidarity with the increasingly suffocating realities of the anthropocene, consequences of a carnal, insatiable desire for power. Her sculptural vocabulary, between the realms of machinery and viscera, inhabits an ambiguous, eclectic environment, free of inhibitions yet entirely cognizant of the unspoken boundaries at play.

Mire Lee lives and works between Seoul, South Korea and Amsterdam, Netherlands. She has earned a bachelor’s degree from the Department of Sculpture (2012) and a graduate degree in media art (2013) at the Seoul National University College of Fine Arts. Her recent solo exhibitions include Mire Lee: Open Wound (2024) the Hyundai Turbine Hall Commission at Tate Modern, London; Black Sun (2023) at the New Museum, New York; Look, I’m a fountain of filth raving mad with love (2022) at ZOLLAMTMMK, MMK Frankfurt; HR Giger & Mire Lee (2022) at Schinkel Pavillon, Berlin; Carriers (2020) at Art Sonje Center, Seoul, amongst others.

Lee’s work was also featured in several group exhibitions including the 11^th Busan Biennale (2022), 59^th International Venice Biennale (2022), 58^th Carnegie International (2022), Schinkel Pavilion, Berlin (2021), Antenna Space, Shanghai (2020), the 15^th Biennale de Lyon, Lyon (2019), Art Sonje, Seoul (2019), and the 12^th Gwangju Biennale Pavilion Project (2018). She was the recipient of the PONTOPREIS MMK 2022 prize, and was shortlisted for the Special Prize at the 2021 Future Generation Art Prize.