Mire Lee creates carnivorous mechanical sculptures that evoke the vulnerability of the human body. Using clay, steel, pumps, hoses, blades, and motor power, Lee creates revolting yet deeply engaging pieces that form a cacophonous, swirling web of bodily desire amid an ever-looming threat of violence. For Lee, desire is deadly.
This past year has seen Lee’s morbid mechanic installations reach a broader, global audience. The Seoul-born and -based artist, who splits her time between there and Amsterdam, has been the subject of numerous exhibitions following her exceptional inclusion in the 59th Venice Biennale’s main exhibition “The Milk of Dreams,” curated by Cecilia Alemani.
Last month, Lee made her New York debut with her solo exhibition “Carriers,” on view through October 22nd at Tina Kim Gallery, which represents the artist. On the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, Lee has had two institutional solo shows this year alone. “Look, I’m a fountain of filth raving mad with love” concluded at the Museum für Moderne Kunst’s Zollamt space in Frankfurt this past September, while “As We Lay Dying” at Kunstmuseum Den Haag in The Hague is open through November 27th.
And at the 58th Carnegie International exhibition, “Is It Morning For You Yet,” Lee’s installation Untitled (My Pittsburgh Sculpture) (2022), on view through April 2023, is a standout. The Busan Biennale, which runs through November 6th, is yet another opportunity to view the artist’s work in person. Lee’s recent accelerated institutional and gallery success across the globe proves that the art world will always have room for the macabre.
With a BFA in sculpture from the College of Fine Arts at Seoul National University, Lee creates, through her process-based practice, visceral immersive installations that overwhelm the body. Inspired by the work of George Bataille, Louise Bourgeois, and H.R. Giger, Lee eroticizes longing and violence across her rotting clay. In Endless House: Holes and Drips (2022), on view in “The Milk of Dreams,” one is simultaneously compelled to care for and be repulsed by her rabid, flaying alien-esque creatures.
Like Giger’s sexualized beings in the films Alien (1979) and Species(1995), Lee’s extraterrestrial-like forms abstractly cast attention to various forms of bodily exploitation by systems of power. Inspired by these engrossing depictions of the body’s insides and genitalia alongside machine power, Lee excavates narratives and emotions around birth, assault, capitalist labor, and desire. This was explicitly clear in her 2021 two-person exhibition “H.R. Giger & Mire Lee” at the Schinkel Pavillon in Berlin.
Lee’s sculptures in “Carriers” take on a more muted tonality compared to the vivid crimson reds and pastel beiges present in her more reactive work at Carnegie International and the Venice Biennale. These monochromatic, deep gray and taupe pieces function like a photonegative of the aforementioned pieces, a shadow side of the decay or disease left to rot in the body. The tension between the two types of work convey a desire by Lee for the vorarephilia of the machine. An all-consuming need to be devoured by romance, or pain, or both.
As Lee stated in a recent interview with Frieze: “I love to romanticize things because, when you romanticize something, you’re not falsifying it, you’re distorting it. It’s like being in a state of delusion, which is still a means—albeit a confused one—of perceiving reality, invariably with a grain of truth at its core.”
—Ayanna Dozier
