Mire Lee
This is a Biennale where kink proliferates, from a Mariann Simnett installation involving S&M to a Zheng Bo video in which dancers attempt to fornicate with plants. But perhaps nowhere in this Biennale is the fetishism quite so gripping as it is in Mire Lee’s giant sculptures, which resemble guts that slop and squish, thanks to the colored liquid glycerine that leaks out of them. These works are references to vore, the desire to be engulfed by someone, which, as Lee told me last year, could be seen as a “universal metaphor” for wanting to fully fuse with another being. Her sculpture Endless House: Holes and Drips (2022), which features her entrail-like forms draped over a scaffolding structure, towers over one room in the Arsenale. The effect is disgusting—and also, for whatever reason, strangely beautiful.
