MIRE LEE
“I EXPEL MYSELF, I spit myself out, I abject myself,” writes Julia Kristeva in Powers of Horror, her 1980 classic of psychoanalytic criticism. In Mire Lee’s morbid environments, fluids surge, orifices open, and pipes leak, though we are never sure what, or who, comes out of them. “I give birth to myself amid the violence of sobs, of vomit,” Kristeva continues. This image—of birth through convulsion—captures the pathos of Lee’s regurgitative sculptures. With their bubbling liquids, Lee’s works often function like fountains in which the very things that were once cast away—shit, bad memories, fluids, afterbirth—are reabsorbed into the systems that shed them. Lee’s governing insight is the intuition that we relate, immediately, to these ugly half-forms. Like them, we identify with the burdens we carry; like them, we are vulnerable organs, jostling through a convulsing social body. For a picture of bleakness, we don’t need them, they seem to suggest. Just look outside your room.
Lee trained in sculpture and media art in Seoul before attending Amsterdam’s Rijksakademie in 2018. In the Netherlands, the artist worked with an engineer to build the lo-fi kinetic sculptural machines for which she has quickly gained renown. In the early Andrea, Ophelia, at the endless house, 2018, exhibited for her Rijksakademie open studio show, the constituent parts of her practice are already there. A rotating machine-powered metal shaft—like a giant rotisserie spit—is affixed with a tangle of wet towels, steel cables, and thick silicone piping. Spattered with a pale fluid resembling glue or semen, it spins with almost painful slowness as its various components smack and slide together in a shallow puddle of viscous muck. Watching Andrea (I’ve only seen it in a video online) is like observing the mating ball of an extraterrestrial snake colony, albeit one clustering around some unholy metal machine mother.
Since then, Lee has scaled up, expanding beyond human-size devices to craft intricate, room-filling environments. When Cecilia Alemani invited her to participate in the 2022 Venice Biennale, the artist responded with Endless House: Holes and Drips, 2022. That work, like several of Lee’s, materialized Endless House, Friedrich Kiesler’s 1959 vision of a “sensuous,” orificial body-as-building. The surrealist architect’s unrealized proposal (for a “last refuge for man as man”) contains no right angles (“more like the female body”) and resembles a continuously curving wall punctuated by holes. In Lee’s reimagining, tentacled organisms were pilloried on a freestanding scaffolding at the Arsenale. On a platform below, milky liquids of variable viscosity burbled through rubber hoses, and fluids trickled down the outsides of plastic sewer pipes. Lee made the sculptures partly out of ceramic, which accounted for their brittle vulnerability as they wet themselves. Thin pink silicone tubes, squirming like millipedes underneath a rock, suggested near-autonomous life. The works’ liquid disjecta was reincorporated into itself, like a sewer system reusing the water that runs into its industrial grates. Everywhere, the reigning effect was one of disgust.
“Disgust is the experience of a nearness that is not wanted,” writes the German literary scholar Winfried Menninghaus. In his 1999 study Disgust, Menninghaus surveyed the underside of the Western aesthetic tradition’s fixation on beauty (from the classical era up through German Romanticism) and identified an injunction against depicting orifices: “digestive organs, mouth, ears, nostrils, nipples, and in general all openings and ‘excrescences.’” Lee’s entire practice, like Kiesler’s endless house, inverts this ban, relishing instead the exposure of the pregnable surface: whether tomblike, hole-filled concrete structures; or tattered, clot-like nets (as in her series “Surface with Many Holes,” 2022); or the kinetic assemblages that first brought Lee international attention.
Recalling innards or otherworldly squids, these motile works represent a perfection of the machines that Lee began working with in Amsterdam. First shown under the title “Carriers” at Art Sonje Center, Seoul, during the initial year of the pandemic (and elsewhere since then, most recently at Tina Kim Gallery, New York), these works are bionic organisms hanging from wires and hose pumps. Carefully programmed motors (such as rotor and peristaltic pumps) push fluids through the works’ exposed tubing: At times, they do so at too slow a pace, calling to mind indigestion; at others, thick milky substances erupt from a flexible hose, like a liberating explosion of phlegm. The work, which feels nearly alive, alternates between multiple liquid states—those of blockage, ejection, suspension, gurgling reuptake. Even more than Lee’s considered materials—grease, cement, glycerin, silicone oil, and the methyl cellulose that’s used in industrial kitchens to make barbecue sauce congeal—these rudimentary physics are what give her systems their unquiet realism.
For “Look, I’m a fountain of filth raving mad with love,” her 2022 exhibition at Frankfurt’s Museum für Moderne Kunst Zollamt, Lee installed a huge, wretched environment resembling a construction site, including rebar, steel sheeting, and a hulking structure—part monster, part petrified galleon sail—that looked coated in cosmic dust. Concrete mixers, their openings gaping like bodily orifices, spun at abrupt, programmed intervals. (Anal imagery recurred throughout the show: POETRY TURNED TO SHIT OUTSIDE THE BODY and other lines from poet Kim Eon Hee—known for her shocking imagery, and the source of the show’s title—were scrawled on the wall.) Near the concrete mixers, a ringlike object hung on the wall, drooping like a sad octopus’s eye. For Lee, who realized the installation again at Sprüth Magers, Berlin, this past month, there is another reference within the reference: The shape resembles the warped scuttle from the doomed Soviet spaceship Soyuz 1, which shot into orbit even while its pilot knew it wasn’t safe to fly, before it hurled itself back to Earth. It’s a disturbing image in itself, but it speaks to the specific cruelty that fascinates Lee: the leaks, missed links, and technocratic mishaps that form, and corrupt, an ever-more complex and ever-faultier world.
Lee made the sculptures partly out of ceramic, which accounted for their brittle vulnerability as they wet themselves.
Why has Lee’s work gained the traction it has? The careful construction of systemic collapse in Lee’s art—her sculpture is nearly always glitchy and dramatically wasteful—resonates with an understanding of the world as structured by vast, impersonal systems where things don’t function as they should. Her industrial settings recall cities as they are now: sites of permanent construction, expulsion, and chronic waste. It hardly seems coincidental that Lee’s work came to the fore during the post-pandemic era, amid which public trust in accounting, health care, government, and other systems tanked, and urban space hollowed out into zones of dysfunction and death. On Lee’s website, she displays a collection of reference images, which together form a kind of twenty-first-century medical encyclopedia cataloguing the human body in states of mass estrangement: a Tinder profile of two people’s mouths contorted, in a gross knot-kiss; a bramble of cable and surge protectors writhing intimately on a concrete floor; a cartoon of a burping pregnant person; shock-red, chopped-up watermelons; and Giovanni Antonio Galli’s Christ Displaying His Wounds. Yet Lee’s art does more than simply hold a mirror up to a hurting world. Through her zealous maximalism, Lee recuperates excrescences and orifices not only as sites of disgust, but as sources of speech, fascination, birth, and liberation—and, perhaps, something like majesty.
This autumn, Lee is bringing her dark materials to Tate’s Turbine Hall; she is the youngest artist ever to be awarded the Tate Hyundai Commission. As she develops her project—among other ideas, she is interested in turning the colossal space into a working factory—she told me she is inspired by miners’ changing rooms: To this day, mines in Europe and North America employ a system of baskets hanging on chains from overhead grids for workers to hoist their clean clothes upon. It’s a ghostly sight, as leagues of empty boots and pants, dangling from the ceiling, give the impression of a mass of hanged people: The image made even more jarring when we consider that this same suspension represents the descent of laborers into the pits of the earth.
When viewing Lee’s work, and her festering organs, slithering cables, and umbilical cords, I am brought back to a story about another chronicler of bleakness, Samuel Beckett. In 1935, the playwright attended a lecture by the psychoanalyst Carl Jung in London. As Jung spoke of a young girl whom he had tried, unsuccessfully, to treat, he paused for a moment and finally said: “The trouble with her was she had never really been born.” Beckett, having received the key to his own unhappiness, grabbed his things and left. The concept of the “improper birth” recurs throughout Beckett’s work and throughout Lee’s entire cosmos. With its carrier collapse, Lee universalizes this failed primal separation—suggesting that, even before death, our improper births might be the certainty we never knew, or never quite stopped forgetting.
