For Mire Lee, Rising Art Star, it all comes down to guts

One morning earlier this month, artist Mire Lee sat outside in a cafe in Seoul discussing an artwork she’d conceived just as she was starting to make plans. “Black Sun,” her show opening soon at the New Museum in Manhattan.

“I still need to work on it a bit,” Lee said, putting down her coffee to put a video of the work on her phone. On screen, a vortex of beige liquid clay swirled around a cement basin and down a center drain, while more of it flowed from a hole higher up in the bowl. It was a bizarre sight – a kind of dirty bath that was continuously pumped empty while vaguely conjuring up bodily substances. A peristaltic pump on the floor kept it flowing.

“I tried to get the viscosity pretty much right so you can see the gap continuously,” she said, “but honestly, maybe it’s not perfect there.”

Welcome to the world of Mire (“me-ray”) Lee, where motors, tubes and pumps combine with silicones, ceramics, fabrics and fluids to create sculptures that are bizarre, messy and (in more ways than one) in motion. Her inventions push the lines of taste, suggesting organs ripped from bodies, mysterious deep-sea creatures or sci-fi ghosts. They pulsate, drip, twirl, ooze, squirm, and sometimes even metamorphose, and when displayed alongside the menacing work of the “Alien” artist HR Giger in a Exhibition 2021 in Berlin they looked completely at home.

They have also made Lee, 34, a sought-after figure worldwide. Her New Museum outing, which opens June 29, comes after a series of performances at some of the international art circuit’s most important showcases: the Carnegie International in Pittsburgh, the Busan Biennial in her native South Korea and the Venice Biennale. That’s where Lee erected scaffolding and decorated it with ceramics reminiscent of animal bones or entrails, and snakes that spit a glaze over them – gradually turning everything redder – before being recycled through grates below.

“What I loved about her work is that it almost feels like an organism’s digestive system, you know?” said Cecilia Alemani, the director and chief curator of High line art in New York, who was artistic director of the 2022 Venice Biennale. “It feels like you’re looking into the guts of a dragon, or something you don’t really want to see. But there is also that sensuality of the skin of the sculptures, the idea of ​​the epidermis changing and in a way also very delicate.”

Lee’s works can inspire horror and awe, although they often also contain a disturbing vulnerability. They don’t quite belong to this world, you feel, and they threaten to malfunction or become conscious at any moment. She “uses the machine as a metaphor for all sorts of different possible emotions or states of being,” says Gary Carrion-Murayari, who curates the New Museum show with Madeline Weisburg, “trying to create a physical sensation that is an emotion. To me, that’s a pretty unusual and backward way of thinking about technology.”

On the fourth floor of the Bowery Institution, Lee is building a high room, wrapped in plastic, that will contain a group of her kinetic sculptures, including the one she showed me. Textiles soaked in liquid clay will hang from the interior walls. It can be warm there, thanks to a steam engine that keeps her clay moist. “I like being a little obnoxious,” she said, “so it feels like it really gets to you.”

The title of the show, “Black Sun,” comes from the philosopher Julia Kristeva’s title vintage 1987 on melancholy. The book “talks a little bit about the impossibility of communication when you’re depressed,” Lee told me in an April video interview from New York, where she was working in a Queens studio making ceramics for the exhibit. “It’s also something sublime for me,” she said. In that state “you become impenetrable, as if in a sense you become absolute. I really like this.”

Far from impenetrable, Lee is bracingly forthright and dryly funny in conversation. “I think I generally don’t know how to chill or relax,” she said.

In the cafe she wore a big green jacket and Nikes. She has a tattoo on her ring finger of an open circle that she made herself. She showed me another new museum piece in progress – a lumpy ceramic mass bound in the style of shibarior Japanese rope bondage — and said she planned to show it on the floor “as a dead body or as a sleeping body.”

Since 2018, Lee has her studio in Amsterdam, where she received a residency at the Rijksakademie, but she has spent most of her life in Seoul. Her father is an artist and her mother ran a publishing house and taught art in a high school. “I wanted to be a filmmaker, which, when I think about it now, was the stupidest idea ever, because you have to work with a lot of people, and I like being my own boss,” she said. “So it’s cool that that didn’t happen.”

Instead, Lee earned a BFA in sculpture and then an MFA from the prestigious Seoul National University. “I’ve always wanted to make wild works, or rough works,” she said, but she was never satisfied. “It would look a little too contained or too deliberate or just fake.” Then she found a solution. “Using engines and techniques that I was really bad at gave me surprising results,” she said. (Her unorthodox materials have extended to cement mixers, churning out sculptures at an exhibition in Frankfurt last year.)

In a disturbing installation at the Seoul Museum of Art (SeMA) in 2016, “Andrea, in my sweetest dreams,” thin streams of a mixture of silicone and oil rain down into a low pool amid screens of videos of young women aboard overcrowded trains. At the time, Lee had an incomplete understanding of her equipment and had to make follow-up visits to get it working properly, she said. “I felt like a bit of a burden to the museum.”

Kinetic art has long been a niche field, ripe for innovation, and you could link Lee to one of its pioneers, the risky Jean Tinguely, specifically his deadly late work. Another predecessor is the classic short film from 1987 “the way things go,” by Peter Fischli and David Weiss, which follows a Rube Goldberg-worthy chain of events. When I looked at it, “it kind of shook my head,” Lee said, “but not in a way that it fed my soul or anything.”

What nourished her soul was the work of the celebrated sculptor Louis Bourgeois and that of Santiago Sierra, whose controversial projects have included paying people modest sums to sit in cardboard boxes or stand facing a wall in a gallery. “I love his use of cruelty,” Lee said, arguing that in his art “there’s no excuse, there’s no wrapping.”

Fortunately, Lee’s art is not cruel, but it is unwavering. It channels impulses, fantasies and images that usually go unspoken in polite company. Meat is on display. Abstracted bodies and psyches are tortured, broken down, or threatened. The women on the train are about to be groped, one of many examples of Lee’s inspiration from pornography. (She appropriated the clips.)

And yet, for all their darkness and implied violence, many of Lee’s works also seem to yearn for connection, for intimacy. Her movie “Sleeping Mother” (2020) shows just that; her mother is resting with her eyes closed and holding a pillow. “I want to keep her close, or I want to involve her or something,” Lee said. In 2017, she and the artist Haneyl Choi did a performance – some kind of broadcast of a canonical one by Marina Abramović and Ulay — where you slept naked in bed with a (clothed) guest all night long. Her take on it now: “Really embarrassing.”

When SeMA commissioned her to create a sculpture for the lobby, she asked 10 artists to give her elements of their own work that were “swallowed,” as then-director, Beck Jee-sook, put it in an email by a skeletal steel sphere high in space that can rotate on its axis. Lee called the 2019 piece, “I want to be together.”

Lee’s recent focus has been on gaps, which also speaks indirectly of a desire for community and exchange. After focusing on sculptures whose purpose is to contain fluid flows and prevent leaks, she said, “I’m now interested in the holes and openings that cause the spill.” That sounds like a formula for making unexpected things happen.

There is also a sense of opportunity in Lee’s practice right now. Her operations are still nimble — she has three part-time assistants — and she said she’s “interested in doing big work, like architectural scale. I’m interested in doing more, like, theatrical works.

“I want to be freer than I am now,” Lee said a moment later, but then she started laughing, and before explaining more, she made a quick disclaimer. “I think I’m pretty free,” she said.