Now, as the first quarter of the 21st century wraps up, what kinds of relationships do artists have – or want – with art collectors? What does patronage look like today? How often do artists truly befriend collectors? How do relationships between artists and collectors shift as the artist’s career progresses? And what possibilities and potentials might future artist/patron relationships hold?
Mire Lee, a Korea-born artist living in Berlin, initially found the idea of people buying her work somewhat ‘alien’ to her practice: Her large-scale kinetic sculptures, like those recently on view in ‘Mire Lee: Open Wound’ at the Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall, are often monumental and ‘messy’ (her word), although she also makes smaller, more collectible pieces. She met New York-based collector Miyoung Lee through Tina Kim, one of her gallerists (the others are Sprüth Magers and Antenna Space), after the former bought a challenging work. ‘Tina called me and told me Miyoung and I should meet,’ explains Mire Lee, so they did. The first encounter involved a Korean meal and shaved ice in New York’s Koreatown, and now the collector feels like a close relative (‘I knew right away that Mire was someone special,’ says Miyoung Lee).
Lee doesn’t know all her collectors, ‘but I sometimes want to know who they are,’ she says. Speaking on the phone from Los Angeles, where she’s installing a show in Sprüth Magers’s California outpost, she tells the story of the late Jean Châtelus, who bought one of the first works Lee sold, Ophelia (2018) in 2019. ‘I was a no-name artist at the time,’ she says. ‘He recently passed away, and he gave his collection to Centre Pompidou.’ Lee never met him, but when she saw her work amongst his other holdings, ‘it was a strange sadness, because I saw how my work fit into his collection. I didn’t realize what it meant to be part of a collection. In retrospect, I see what it means to be seen by someone.’
—Kimberly Bradley
