One morning earlier this month, the artist Mire Lee was sitting exterior at a restaurant in Seoul as she mentioned an art work that she got here up with simply as she began planning “Black Sun,” her present opening quickly on the New Museum in Manhattan.
“I still need to work on it a little,” Lee mentioned, setting down her espresso to drag up a video of the work on her cellphone. Onscreen, a whirlpool of beige liquid clay swirled round a cement basin and down a drain at its middle, as extra of it flowed in from a gap larger within the bowl. It was a weird sight — a form of mucky tub that was perpetually being drained whereas vaguely conjuring bodily substances. A peristaltic pump on the ground stored it flowing.
“I’ve been trying to make the viscosity just about right so that you can see the hole continuously,” she mentioned, “but honestly, maybe it’s not perfectly there.”
Welcome to the world of Mire (“me-ray”) Lee, the place motors, tubes, and pumps paired with silicone, ceramics, materials and liquids turn out to be sculptures which are weird, messy and (in additional methods than one) shifting. Pushing strains of style, her innovations can recommend organs ripped from our bodies, mysterious deep-sea creatures or sci-fi wraiths. They pulsate, drip, twist, ooze, squirm and generally even metamorphose, and after they have been displayed alongside the menacing work of the “Alien” artist H.R. Giger in a 2021 exhibition in Berlin, they regarded proper at residence.
They have additionally made Lee, 34, a sought-after determine globally. Her New Museum outing, which opens June 29, comes after a string of appearances at among the worldwide artwork circuit’s most vital showcases: the Carnegie International in Pittsburgh, the Busan Biennale in her native South Korea and the Venice Biennale. That was the place Lee erected scaffolding and festooned it with ceramics that recalled animal bones or entrails, and hoses that spewed a glaze over them — step by step making every thing an increasing number of crimson — earlier than being recycled by means of grates under.
“What I loved about her work is that it feels almost like a digestive system of an organism, you know?” mentioned Cecilia Alemani, the director and chief curator of High Line Art in New York, who was the inventive director of the 2022 Venice Biennale. “It feels like you’re looking inside the guts of a dragon, or like something that you don’t actually want to see. But there is also this sensuality of the skin of the sculptures, the idea of the epidermis that changes and is also quite delicate in a way.”
Lee’s works can induce horror and awe, although they usually additionally harbor a disquieting vulnerability. They don’t fairly belong to this world, you sense, and so they threaten to malfunction or turn out to be sentient at any second. She is “using the machine as a metaphor for all kinds of different possible emotions or states of being,” mentioned Gary Carrion-Murayari, who’s curating the New Museum present with Madeline Weisburg, and “trying to create a physical sensation that may evoke an emotion. To me, that’s a quite unusual and a backward way to think about technology.”
Within the fourth flooring of the Bowery establishment, Lee is establishing a tall room, wrapped in plastic, that may comprise a bunch of her kinetic sculptures, together with the one she confirmed me. Textiles dipped in liquid clay will dangle on its inside partitions. It could also be heat in there, due to a steam machine, which is able to maintain her clay humid. “I like it to be a bit unpleasant,” she mentioned, “so that it feels like it’s actually getting onto you.”
The present’s title, “Black Sun,” comes from the title of the thinker Julia Kristeva’s 1987 quantity on melancholia. The e-book “talks a little bit about the impossibility of communication when you are depressed,” Lee informed me in a video interview in April from New York, the place she was working in a studio in Queens making ceramics for the exhibition. “For me, it’s also a sublime thing,” she mentioned. In that state, “you become impenetrable, like you become absolute in a way. This I really love.”
Far from impenetrable, Lee is bracingly candid, and dryly humorous, in dialog. “I think in general I don’t know how to chill or relax,” she mentioned.
At the cafe, she was carrying a big inexperienced jacket and Nikes. She has a tattoo on her ring finger of an open circle that she gave herself. She confirmed me one other in-progress New Museum piece — a lumpy ceramic mass tied within the fashion of shibari, or Japanese rope bondage — and mentioned that she meant to show it on the bottom “like a dead body or like a sleeping body.”
Since 2018, Lee has had her studio in Amsterdam, the place she acquired a residency on the Rijksakademie, however she has spent most of her life in Seoul. Her father is an artist, and her mom ran a publishing firm and taught artwork at a center faculty. “I wanted to become a filmmaker, which, if I think about it now, it was the stupidest idea ever because you have to work with a lot of people, and I love to be my own boss,” she mentioned. “So, it’s cool that didn’t happen.”
Instead, Lee received a B.F.A. in sculpture, after which an M.F.A., from the celebrated Seoul National University. “I always wanted to make wild-looking kind of works, or crude works,” she mentioned, however she was by no means content material. “It would look a little bit too contained or too intentional or just fake.” Then she discovered an answer. “Using motors and techniques that I was really, like, bad at gave me surprising results,” she mentioned. (Her unorthodox supplies have prolonged to cement mixers, which churned sculptures at an exhibition in Frankfurt final yr.)
In an unsettling set up on the Seoul Museum of Art (SeMA) in 2016, “Andrea, in my mildest dreams,” skinny streams of a silicone-oil combination rain right into a low pool amid screens with movies of younger girls aboard crowded trains. At the time, Lee had an incomplete understanding of her tools, and needed to make follow-up visits to maintain it working correctly, she mentioned. “I felt a bit like a burden to the museum.”
Kinetic artwork has lengthy been one thing of a distinct segment subject, ripe for innovation, and you can hyperlink Lee to one in every of its pioneers, the risk-taking Jean Tinguely, significantly his deathly late work. Another precursor is the traditional 1987 brief movie “The Way Things Go,” by Peter Fischli and David Weiss, which follows a Rube Goldberg-worthy chain of occasions. Watching it “blew my mind a little,” Lee mentioned, “but not in a way that it fed my soul or anything.”
What did nourish her soul was the work of the celebrated sculptor Louise Bourgeois and that of Santiago Sierra, whose controversial initiatives have included paying individuals modest sums to sit down inside cardboard packing containers or stand going through a wall in a gallery. “I love his use of cruelty,” Lee mentioned, arguing that in his artwork “there’s no excuse, there’s no wrapping.”
Lee’s artwork just isn’t merciless, mercifully, however it’s unflinching. It channels impulses, fantasies and imagery that often go unstated in well mannered firm. Flesh is on show. Abstracted our bodies and psyches are being tortured or breaking down, or they’re below risk. The girls using the prepare are about to be groped, one in every of a number of cases of Lee’s taking inspiration from pornography. (She appropriated the clips.)
And but, for all of their darkness and implied violence, lots of Lee’s works additionally appear to yearn for connection, for intimacy. Her video “Sleeping mom” (2020) exhibits precisely that; her mom resting along with her eyes closed, holding a pillow. “I want to keep her close, or I want to involve her or something,” Lee mentioned. In 2017, she and the artist Haneyl Choi did a efficiency — a type of sendup of a canonical one by Marina Abramović and Ulay — that concerned sleeping in mattress all evening, bare, with a (clothed) visitor. Her view of that now: “Really embarrassing.”
When SeMA commissioned her to make a sculpture for its foyer, she requested 10 artists to provide her parts of their very own work that have been “swallowed,” as its then-director, Beck Jee-sook, put it in an e-mail, by a skeletal metal sphere excessive up within the house that may rotate on its axis. Lee named the 2019 piece, “i wanna be together.”
Lee’s latest focus has been holes, which additionally obliquely speaks to a need for communion and change. After specializing in sculptures that goal to comprise liquid flows and forestall leaks, she mentioned, “I’m now interested in the holes and gaps that make the leakage happen.” That seems like a system for having surprising issues transpire.
There is a sense of alternative in Lee’s observe proper now, too. Her operations are nonetheless nimble — she has three part-time assistants — and she or he mentioned that she is “interested in making big work, like architectural scale. I’m interested in making more, like, theatrical works.”
“I want to be freer than now,” Lee mentioned a second later, however then she began laughing, and earlier than she defined extra, she made a rapid disclaimer. “I think I am pretty free,” she mentioned.
Source: www.nytimes.com