Sheets of fabric, dipped in clay and chipped with the markings of time, hang suspended like skeletal windchimes. Hunks of flesh-like forms glisten in their gummy film, expanding and collapsing; their life force pumps through a thick network of ducts and pipes. Life incarnate. ‘I write to you now, at the very moment itself…’, Ukrainian-Brazilian novelist, Clarice Lispector (1920 –1977), addresses us in Água Viva (1973): ‘I am rudely alive.’
Collisions of flesh and machine, revolving turbines and kinetic metal, Mire Lee’s installations can be described as rudely alive. Sonically abrasive and visually jarring, they cough up everything we strive to keep hidden. Rubber cables resemble intestinal tracts — the horrific proof of a body cut open, a body in pain. Unknown milky secretions drip from metallic crevices — surface arousal, a body in pleasure. As her most recent solo show, The Heart of My Machine is Golden Lead (2026), opens at Secession, Vienna, the South Korean artist speaks to us about the joy in limitations, the unexpected reception of her works and what collaborations the future holds.
Maggie Kuzan: Let’s begin with your current exhibition THE (PSYCHO)SOMATIC ZONE at the Institute of Contemporary Art – Frac Rhône-Alpes, Villeurbanne, France (from 3 April to 2 August 2026). At the heart of the show is the colossal revolving turbine, first seen in your 2024 Tate Modern Turbine Hall Commission, Open Wound. Why did you want to centre this machine again?
Mire Lee: The turbine has a very strong texture that you can only appreciate up close, so it was exciting to show it at ground level. I also love the idea of showing sculptures like that — really tied up. It was an ambitious project for both my gallery and the institution to bring together such huge objects on this scale, so I felt it was an opportunity I couldn’t refuse.
MK: How did you approach the surrounding works?
ML: It came naturally after visiting the site. I love the symmetrical space of the IAC — it sparks a lot of ideas of monumentality for me. The turbine became the anchor point, and everything else developed from the space itself. I am increasingly thinking about exhibitions through scenography — I imagine how a visitor would like to walk through the show. It’s a part of the work that I’m enjoying more and more.
MK: You have expressed that you are interested in the erotic dimensions of sculpture, of viewing them as skins. Where does the female body sit within that relationship between surface, desire and material?
ML: During the Turbine Hall exhibition, a TikTok video of the installation went viral in the endometriosis community. Many people were posting that the installation captured what the pain felt like in their bodies. I didn’t consciously plan to represent female bodies, but I was strangely proud that the work could give form to the pain that women live with.
My earlier work was definitely much more abstract, but my own lived experiences have made it more direct. When I did my show Carriers in 2020, the title referred to the sculptures, but also to my mother as my carrier. Since then, many of the difficulties that women face have become much closer to me. I’m a sculptor with a lot of hands-on material content, so those experiences inevitably fuse with the work, too.
MK: Your sculptures often feel limitless, yet they have a clear structure, too. Does the work develop in an intuitive way
ML: Sculpture provides me with healthy limits. I think of it as an analogy because I cannot imagine being a writer or a painter. I think it’s horrifying to create something out of nothing. Really, I get stressed if I think about it! So sculpture and installation as a medium provide me with some sort of framework. I think, like in life, you need purpose, any kind of structure that holds you together, whether that’s work or family. In a sense, I don’t think they are real (laughs), but you have to make up your own purpose to be able to not go insane. So, in that regard, I find sculpture as a medium reassuring compared to writing or painting.
MK: The titles of your works are incredibly poetic. What was the story behind the scrolling wall with text in Korean, in German and in English in your installation, Look, I’m a fountain of filth raving mad with love?
ML: The title is a quote from a Korean poet, Kim Eon-Hee, whom I really admire. All the writing on the wall is from her poems. My colleagues and I have been translating her work into English for several years, and that exhibition became a major trigger in the process. For a long time, I resisted language because it meant you needed an education or access to knowledge. Conceptually, I wanted my work to exist without it. But actually, I love language and reading. Poetry, especially, feels much closer to art because it’s like a broken language, or one that is not meant to make sense. When I fantasise about the ultimate form my work might take, it could be literature or poetry.
MK: What are your inspirations?
ML: Other people. Other than that, traumatic or strong experiences. They could also be very positive, but something that shakes you.
MK: How does your cultural identity shape your practice?
ML: Being a Korean is a wacky one now. There is the global popularity of K-pop, we’re so obsessed with new things and with rapid digitalisation. During the Turbine Hall commission, there were many situations where I was asked to represent or act as some sort of an ambassador for Korea. I actually felt disconnected from that role and quite lost.
MK: Liquids are central to your work. Where did that fascination begin?
ML: It was something I discovered along the way. I was using it as a lubricant for machinery. When there is a lot of heat introduced in steel work, you use this milky liquid to cool the blade down as it cuts through the fat metal block. The imagery of fluids goes really well with the machinery bodies, and an instant erotic imagery is created. The sensualisation of machines and industrial entities begins as early as the tradition of futurism, and is still relatively new. Now hyperdigitalisation is accelerating it, making it increasingly schizophrenic and ever more existential.
When I was a student, Bataille’s Erotism (1957) was a book that really shook me. I discovered films like Andrzej Żuławski’s Possession (1981), where Isabelle Adjani, a stunningly beautiful actor, goes mad in the metro, and there’s a lot of white liquid. All Julia Ducournau’s films and Claire Denis’ Trouble Every Day (2001) / High Life (2018) stuck with me, too. Liquid is like original sin. Some artworks and images burn into your nervous system, and then you can never wash them away.
MK: Has your relationship and use of liquids changed in our increasingly digitalised culture?
ML: I do feel my use of liquid is much slower because it’s a real substance. You can’t edit it, so there is a certain frustration, but I also value its limits when everything is supposedly limitless in terms of image and knowledge circulation. In Samuel Beckett’s novel Molloy (1951), there’s a description of a strange creature. He’s probably human, but very slow and likely cognitively impaired. I often think about Molloy in relation to my feelings towards sculpture as an old-school medium, and I like that.
MK: Your recently opened exhibition at the Secession in Vienna is titled The Heart of My Machine is Golden Lead. How did you decide on this title?
ML: When you describe someone who works endlessly, you might say ‘she’s like a machine’, and my friends say that about me. Then there was an actual machine in the show, so I started calling her ‘my machine’. I knew I wanted it to feel strongly sentimental, but my other intentions were still a mystery to me, so I thought, ‘Let’s think about it later.’
Every artist develops patterns in their work based on things that are deeply rooted in who they are. There are certain influences that have shaped you a certain way. Societal expectations and institutional concerns try to frame a presentable version of you. I was trying to work a little bit more with myself, with my patterns, shape and forms, even though it’s uncomfortable because those are the parts of myself I dislike.
MK: What are you working on now?
ML: I took a stage designer’s role for a new play by the Japanese playwright Satoko Ichihara. I’m making sculptures for her piece, which is a gender-reversed, much darker adaptation of Princess Mononoke.
—Maggie Kuzan
