One morning earlier this month, artist Mire Lee was sitting outside a cafe in Seoul discussing artwork that came to her when she was just beginning to plan. “Black Sun” she show A new museum in Manhattan will open soon.
“We still have a little work to do,” Li said as he put down his coffee and played a video of the work on his phone. On the screen, a swirl of beige liquid clay swirled around the cement basin, flowing into its central drain, and more clay pouring in through holes high in the bowl. It was a strange sight. It was a sort of dirty bath that was constantly being drained, vaguely evoking bodily matter. A peristaltic pump in the floor maintained the flow.
“I’ve been trying to get the consistency just right so that the holes are visible continuously, but to be honest, it may not be perfect,” she said.
Welcome to the world of Mire (“me-ray”) Lee. There, motors, tubes, and pumps combine with silicon, ceramics, fabrics, and liquids to create strange, messy, moving sculptures (in more than one sense). Her inventions that push the line of her tastes can be reminiscent of organs torn from her remains, mysterious deep-sea creatures, or her sci-fi ghosts. They pulsate, drip, twist, ooze, wriggle, and sometimes even metamorphose. “Alien” Artist H.R. Giger and 2021 exhibition In Berlin they felt right at home.
They have also made the 34-year-old Lee a globally sought-after figure. Her new museum exhibition, which opens on June 29th, comes after a series of appearances at some of the most important showcases of the international art circuit. carnegie international in Pittsburgh, Busan Biennale South Korea, her home country, Venice Biennale. This is where Lee built scaffolding and decorated it with pottery reminiscent of animal bones and entrails, over which a hose squirting glaze gradually turns everything red before being recycled through the grate below. rice field.
“What I love about her work is that it feels like an organism’s digestive system,” she said. Cecilia Alemani Director and Chief Curator of high line art He was the artistic director of the 2022 Venice Biennale. “I feel like I’m looking inside a dragon’s guts, or something I really don’t want to see. But there’s also the sensuality of the sculpture’s skin, the idea of the changing epidermis, and in a way it’s It’s also very delicate.”
Lee’s work can evoke fear and awe, but it is often also disturbingly vulnerable. As you feel, they are completely otherworldly and threaten to malfunction or become sentient at any moment. Gary Carrion Murajari, who curates the New Museum’s exhibition with Madeline Weisberg, says she “uses machines as metaphors for all kinds of possible emotions and states of being, and evokes emotions.” I’m trying to create a physical sensation that is possible.” emotions. To me, this is a very unusual, backwards way of thinking about technology. “
On the fourth floor of the Bowery facility, Lee is constructing a tall room wrapped in plastic. There will be a group of her dynamic sculptures on display, including the one she showed me. A fabric soaked in liquid clay hangs on the inner wall. The steam machine keeps the clay moist, so the room may be warm. “I like the feeling of being a little uncomfortable, so it really feels like it’s pressing on you,” she said.
program title, “Black Sun” It comes from the title of the philosopher Julia Kristeva. Volume 1987 About melancholy. The book “writes a little bit about the impossibility of communication when you’re depressed,” Lee told me in a video interview from New York in April. She was making ceramics for exhibitions in her studio in Queens. “For me, it’s also sublime,” she said. In that state, “You become impenetrable, just as you become absolute in a way. I really love this.”
Far from being incomprehensible, Lee is resolutely straightforward in dialogue and dryly funny. “Generally, I don’t think I know how to relax or unwind,” she said.
At the cafe, she wore a big green jacket and Nikes. On her ring finger, she has a white circle tattoo that she made herself. She showed me another new museum piece in the works. bindingor bondage with Japanese ropes – and she said she intended to hang it on the ground “like a corpse, or like a sleeping body.”
Since 2018 Lee has a studio in Amsterdam where he has a residency. National University of AmsterdamHowever, she spent most of her life in Seoul. Her father was an artist and her mother ran a publishing company and taught art in middle school. “I wanted to be a film director, but now that I think about it, it was the stupidest idea because I have to work with so many people. I want to be my own boss.” is,” she said. “So I’m glad it didn’t happen.”
Instead, Lee earned a Bachelor’s degree in Sculpture from the prestigious Seoul National University, followed by a Master’s degree. “She’s always wanted to do wild work, crude work,” she said, but she was never satisfied. “It would look a little too restrained, too purposeful, or just plain fake.” Then she found her solution. “Using a motor and technique that I was really bad at, I got amazing results,” she said. (Her unconventional materials extend to cement mixers, whose sculptures were stirred at an exhibition in Frankfurt last year.)
In a disturbing installation at the Seoul Museum of Art (SeMA) in 2016, “Andrea, in my mildest dreams” Thin streams of a mixture of silicone and oil rain down onto a low pool as a video of a young woman boarding a crowded train appears on the screen. Ms. Li didn’t fully understand her device at the time, so she had to make a follow-up visit to get her device working properly, she said. “I felt like it was a bit of a burden for the museum,” she said.
Kinetic art has long been a niche field, ripe for innovation, and can link Lee to one of its pioneers, the risk-taker Jean Tinguely, especially his work. dead slow work.Another of his precursors is the 1987 classic short film “How things are done” A Rube Goldberg-worthy series of events from Peter Fischli and David Weiss. “I was a little shocked,” Lee said. “But it didn’t feed my soul or do anything.”
It was the work of a famous sculptor that nourished her soul Louise Bourgeois and it’s Santiago Sierra, That controversial project involved paying people a modest amount to sit inside a cardboard box or stand against a wall in a gallery. “I love the way he uses cruelty,” Lee said, insisting that his art has “no excuses, no envelopment.”
Lee’s art is not cruel, benevolent, but unflinching. It conveys impulses, fantasies, and images that are usually unspoken in polite socializing. Meat is on display. Abstract bodies and minds are tortured, destroyed, or threatened. Women on trains being groped are just one of several examples of Lee drawing inspiration from pornography. (She appropriated the clip.)
But much of Lee’s work also seems to yearn for connection and intimacy, despite its darkness and suggestive violence.her video “Sleeping Mom” (2020) shows just that. Her mother was resting on her pillow with her eyes closed. “I want to keep her close to her, or involve her, or do something,” Ms. Lee said. In 2017, she and the artist Hanil Choi performed — kind of a send-off regular By Marina Abramović and Ulai — It involved sleeping naked in bed all night with (clothed) guests. She now thinks it’s “really embarrassing”.
When SeMA commissioned her to create a sculpture for its lobby, she asked 10 artists to provide elements of her work, then-director Beck Sieske said in an email. So, “swallowed” was skeletal. A ball of steel that can rotate on its own axis, high in space. Lee named his 2019 work “I want to be with you.”
Lee’s recent focus is on ‘holes’, which also hint at a desire for fellowship and interaction. After focusing on her sculptures, which are meant to contain fluid flow and prevent leaks, she said, “Now I’m more interested in holes and crevices that cause leaks.” It sounds like a formula for the unexpected to happen.
There is a premonition of a chance in Lee’s practice. Her business remains agile and she has three part-time assistants. She said, “She is interested in making large-scale works on an architectural scale.” She is more interested in making theater productions and so on. “
“I want to be freer than I am now,” Li said quickly, but then began to laugh and quickly declined before elaborating. “I think I’m pretty free,” she said.
