Black Sun: Surface with many holes– #10 was commissioned for Mire Lee’s first major institutional solo exhibition in the United States, at the New Museum, New York, in 2023. Developed in collaboration with the Scandinavian textile company Kvadrat, Lee used Kvadrat’s heritage textiles subjecting them to a process of puncturing, tearing, and coating with pigmented clay slip. The result, a skin-like curtain, is simultaneously delicate and grotesque. Surface with Many Holes, evokes a corporeal vulnerability, like skin that has been scarred, sutured, or torn. Lee’s acclaimed New Museum exhibition, Black Sun, takes its title from Julia Kristeva’s psychoanalytic text, Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia (1989). Kristeva conceptualizes the “black sun” as a metaphor for a deeply melancholic state, describing depression as an “abyss of sorrow.” Lee’s work echoes this visceral feeling by creating spaces of both longing and rupture. Her textiles, torn and damaged, become metaphors for psychic and bodily trauma. Resisting resolution, they linger instead in states of suspension and vulnerability.