Busan Biennale 2022: Mire Lee

In her works, Mire Lee combines heterogeneous materials and forms to evince unique sensory experiences. For example, by mixing viscous liquids with rough substances often found at construction sites - such as cement, resin, steel, and plaster - Lee generates tactile sensations from inanimate surfaces. She also creates kinetic sculptures and installations that seem to move or breathe slowly. Even from a distance, these attenuated movements permeate the body, inducing potent sensations beneath the surface. By arousing extreme emotions or physical tension, her works transform sterile representations and abstract forms into instinctive or animalistic states. In particular, viewers feel inexplicably drawn to, and eventually consumed by, her large installations that emphasize the inherent chaos of coexisting with countless other living beings. Lee has been expanding with countless other living beings. Lee has been expanding her art to explore the synthesis of organisms and machines, states of extreme coexistence, the fear and beauty of a finite existence, and relationships between women. For the Busan Biennale, Mire Lee has installed a new work at a building once used by Songkang Heavy Industries Co., Ltd, a company involved in shipbuilding. Notably, part of the building's roof and walls were destroyed by a typhoon, explosing the underlying framework. The installation consists of a huge mass surrounded by porous shells, which subsumes the architectural skin and skeleton of the building as part of the work. Even with its enormous size, the structure resembles an organism swallowed by the abandoned factory, like a battered whale.