Inside an empty auditorium at Tate Modern, Mire Lee is discussing addiction. “Everybody watches porn sometimes,” says the 36-year-old Korean artist. “But when you’re doing that 24/7 …” She trails off. “I was hugely addicted to pornography.”
It takes courage to confess this to a journalist you’ve just met, but Lee – who, next week, will become the 23rd artist to fill Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall – is compelled by things that are “taboo”. “I’m very interested in negativity,” she tells me, “because it’s rejected in society.”
Her addiction began, she explains, in her late 20s, when she suffered a “major episode” of depression, “on a clinical level [and] lasting several months”, during which she trawled the internet obsessively for extreme content. “I would watch a lot of pornography, and then a lot of terrorism-related media materials,” she recalls. “And when that got too horrendous, to wash it out, I’d watch porn again.”
But, she adds, while sipping from a takeaway coffee cup and smiling, “I’m not, like, chronically depressed.” Is she concerned she might relapse? “I worry a lot, so I try to keep myself busy,” replies Lee, who was born in Seoul (her first name is pronounced “me-ray”), but lives today between Berlin and Amsterdam. She’s been based in the latter for the past six years, and speaks with a slight Dutch accent.
Vulnerability, disgust, a sense of something unspeakable: all rank highly among Lee’s artistic preoccupations. “In general,” she says, referring to her large-scale kinetic sculptural installations, which appear to ooze off-putting corporeal fluids, and have been categorised as “body horror” by some critics, “I like the atmosphere to feel visceral. I’m interested in making works that surround you, so that, when you’re inside, you have a physical experience.”
This is related to her interest in, as she puts it, “fetish culture”, with which, she says, she has been “familiar” since she was “very young”. She remains fascinated by “vore”, or vorarephilia, a type of fetish that eroticises the act of consumption – either eating, or being eaten by, another person or creature. “With all sexual fetishes, you can’t help it – it’s not something you can control,” she once explained. “This feels similar to art.”
Scatology (a sexual preoccupation with excrement) is also “really interesting”, says Lee, whose work has been acquired by, among other institutions, Paris’s Centre Pompidou and Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Two years ago, inside an exhibition in Frankfurt titled Look, I’m a fountain of filth raving mad with love, she presented footage of an interview with the “amazing” Austrian pornographic actress Veronica Moser. She’s drawn, too, to the “Medusa of Korean poetry”, Kim Eon Hee, whose writing, Lee tells me, “deals a lot with excrement, the image of s---, piss. She’s very gore-ish, but special. There’s a weird warmth in her work.”
Perhaps I should have anticipated that our conversation was going to be X-rated, having encountered, at the 2022 Venice Biennale, her “gore-ish” installation Endless House: Holes and Drips, which brought her to international attention. Within the Arsenale, an atmospheric complex of former shipyards and armouries, she presented a group of biomorphic sculptures like internal organs arranged upon a scaffold, from which wiggling tubes, like severed arteries, spurted a dark liquid circulated by a motorised pump. Cement mixers, PVC hoses and discarded car oil, as well as peristaltic pumps, have all featured in Lee’s messy, often-squirming installations, which are sometimes likened to “biological machines”, and can be self-consciously ridiculous.
Like a lot of her work, Endless House had the atmosphere of an abattoir; it could have been a set for a gruesome scene in a slasher movie. According to Lee, her research for it involved watching online videos of so-called harlequin babies, born with a severe genetic disorder affecting the skin. “Do I think my own work is grotesque? Maybe a bit,” she once said.
The sculpture’s offal-like blobs also had an otherworldly, sci-fi quality, as if they were the entrails of extraterrestrials. When she was 10, her father, who is a surrealist sculptor, gave Lee a catalogue of H R Giger (1940-2014), the Swiss visionary who won an Oscar for his biomechanical designs for Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979). Three years ago, their work was paired together in an exhibition in Berlin.
After Venice, Lee – who also had a solo show at New York’s New Museum last year – created Landscape with Many Holes, which was constructed from scaffolding and fence fabric and presented, as part of South Korea’s 11th Busan Biennale in 2022, inside an abandoned ship factory (where it was damaged during a typhoon). It proved that she could work successfully at scale: “Physically, that was the biggest sculpture installation I ever did,” she tells me. So, I can understand why Tate selected her for this year’s Turbine Hall commission.
Thanks to its exposed girders, the space has a skeletal quality, like the ribcage of a whale, and should be a powerful setting for Lee’s palpably carnal work – just as it was, in 2002, for Anish Kapoor’s Marsyas, a carpaccio-red sculpture of flaring, trumpet-like forms suggestive of flayed flesh. On my way to meet Lee, I glimpse people working on her commission, hoisting strange structures on armatures like tattered sheets or great flaps of skin.
At the outset, she recalls, Tate sent her “the whole archive” detailing past commissions, but “I didn’t really look at it”. She’s visited London “quite a few times” – she finds it “very different to Amsterdam, more like Seoul, in terms of scale, how busy it is, how stressed people are” – and, in 2011, caught one of the commissions in person: Ai Weiwei’s funereal installation of millions of porcelain sunflower seeds, which carpeted the Turbine Hall as if with a layer of ash. “I was impressed,” she recalls. “It was very calm.”
On the day we meet, Lee is under instructions not to reveal details of her commission, but she does say that the Turbine Hall’s “history” and “charisma”, which she hopes to “exploit, or kind of hop on”, has led her “naturally” to take “a little bit of a different course”. She says, “I wanted to try things I’ve never done before.”
To experiment on such a big stage is bold. But Lee, who has already been in London for five days when we meet, and is staying in a flat near Victoria station with her team of three part-time assistants, doesn’t seem fazed. “Either I am optimistic or delusional,” she says, but, when she was offered the commission last summer, “I wasn’t as scared as many people think I would have been. Mainly, I was just very happy.” She describes herself as a “workaholic”, and relishes “working with urgency: it energises me”. She also likes to embrace “accidents and mishaps” and is enjoying the fact that the Tate has given her a decent budget. Is it a lot of money? “Yeah,” she laughs, “loads. I’ve never worked with this kind of funding.”
Why is she so interested in “negativity”? “Because,” she replies, “in our time, we are under pressure to be positive, and only have positive things in life, or to appear so.” In part, this is a consequence of what she calls today’s digital display culture: “Your life is on display, always viewed by other people.”
Yet, Lee believes, some of the most “deep, insightful moments in life” can, in fact, be connected to negative experiences. “Negativity is obviously present as much as positivity – and oftentimes it makes us feel much stronger things, makes us realise and understand more things, than positivity.”
She continues the thought: “Family is a good example. Most of our darkest experiences in life are associated with, or involve, family. Like, the most horrible fight you can ever have is with someone you’re closest to and inseparable from. But that makes it also special, because it puts you in a very vulnerable position. You cannot just cut your family away, no matter how horrible or grotesque it becomes. So, anything that involves depth has a relationship with negativity.”
Her feelings about her own family are, she tells me, “complicated”. “I didn’t grow up with my father,” she says; her mother ran a publishing company, and was “very, very busy”. When she was young, Lee loved manga comics and films (especially anything directed by Quentin Tarantino or David Cronenberg), and eventually plunged into the “subculture” of the early internet. She’s always had a “very close relationship” with “things that are excluded from the mainstream”, she says. As an adolescent – when she inked an image of an open circle onto her wedding finger (“A stupid teenager’s tattoo,” she calls it now, regretfully) – she watched “tonnes” of snuff videos: “You have less inhibitions as a child or a teenager. Morality and ethics don’t register – yet.” Snuff films made her conscious of “how easy mortality is, and how insignificant the lives of humans can feel, how quickly they can just go”, which perhaps shaped her later interest in vulnerability, after studying sculpture at Seoul National University.
Like me, Lee belongs to the generation of millennials who were born in a pre-internet era but came of age when it was taking off. To what extent is her investigation into “negativity” a critique of our digital age?
“It is what it is,” she says. “I don’t think I’m critical of it. I just find it interesting, what it does to us.” She pauses. “I see our time, and then us, living in our time helplessly, getting exposed to it. And I’m curious: what’s going to happen after one or two generations, for people born into this world?”
—Alastair Sooke
