Mire Lee

Mire Lee’s (b. 1988) works defy categorization, yet they are idiosyncratic, exuding energy that is entropic and full of polarizing, enticing, and nauseating sentiments. Unsightly yet inexplicably sensational, 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. 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 holds a Bachelor of Arts from the Department of Sculpture (2012) and in Media Arts (2013) from Seoul National University. 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 (2021-2022) at Schinkel Pavillon, Berlin; Carriers (2020) at Art Sonje Center, Seoul, amongst others.

Lee’s work was also featured in several group exhibitions, including presentations at MMCA, Seoul (2024), High Line Art, New York (2024), Busan Biennale, Busan (2022), 59th Venice Biennale, Venice (2022), and the 58th Carnegie International, Pittsburgh (2022). She took part in residencies at the Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten, Amsterdam (2018); Seoul Museum of Art (SeMA Nanji Residency) (2017), Cité internationale des arts, Paris (2015), and was recipient of a Special Prize at the 2021 Future Generation Art Prize.