You’re not going to like it. In fact, you might hate it. But this year’s commission for Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall, by South Korean artist Mire Lee, is the goriest yet – and astonishingly powerful. Lee, who is only 36 years old, has established a reputation for “body horror” sculptural installations, like disturbing sets for dystopian sci-fi movies. And, with Open Wound, she delivers what Tate presumably hired her to do.
At first, if you enter from the west, there’s little sense of the horrors to come. A few ragged scraps of dark pink fabric are suspended on chains, like gigantic flaps of flayed flesh. The artist calls these misshapen, cobweb-like structures “skins”. One or two inadvertently create droopy, ghoulish visages, which reminded me of the howling figure in Edvard Munch’s The Scream (1893). Happy Halloween!
Beyond, though, the central bridge – which, at Lee’s request, has been partially dismantled, to reveal the building’s “guts” (to chime, I suppose, with her “visceral” work) – we encounter the installation’s centrepiece: a vast cylindrical metal structure, like a rusty-looking jet engine. This slowly revolving turbine, which grinds away according to some infernal, implacable logic of its own, is also strung up on chains, in the manner of a carcass in an abattoir.
Long, matted silicone tendrils dangle from it like a colossal spider’s legs, pumping out a filthy, viscous liquid that constantly (and audibly) drips onto more “skins” below, before pooling in a massive sloping tray. It is, perhaps, the most miserable, menacing waterfall imaginable. Be warned: stand too close, and you’ll get splashed.
Hollywood’s finest set designers couldn’t produce anything more spectacular; it’s no surprise that a recent exhibition paired Lee’s work with that of the visionary Swiss artist HR Giger, who designed Ridley Scott’s Alien. And, thanks to its many industrial fixtures and fittings (clamps, hooks, and scaffolding, as well as chains), Open Wound appears tailor-made for this former power station. The monstrous turbine, which of course evokes the machinery that once dominated this space, even hangs from a specially recommissioned overhead crane.
Eventually, those damp “skins” beneath it will dry out and be harvested, before they’re hoisted up to join the many other wispy membranes already suspended nearby; over the next few months, Lee’s installation will therefore evolve and expand. This cyclical, generative, factory-like aspect is, I sense, inspired.
What does it mean? Dare we even ask? After a few minutes with this gruesome piece, you may prefer to hide behind a sofa. If, though, we’re brave enough to probe this Open Wound, then, we may conclude, it’s predicated on the contrast between man and machine. Its sculptural impression of skin and bones offers a vision of humanity as something very frail – which fits the precariousness of the times. If this were an allegorical artwork, it would be called “War”.
Art doesn’t have to be sunshine and smiles – think of Hieronymus Bosch’s topsy-turvy hellscapes, or the Black Paintings of Francisco de Goya. Lee’s melodramatic creation, which seems to symbolise the “meat grinder” of contemporary conflict, is as dark and unsettling as it comes.
—Alastair Sooke
