CURA.

The New Museum present the first American solo museum exhibition of the work of Mire Lee (b. 1988, Seoul, South Korea; lives and works between Seoul and Amsterdam, Netherlands). Installed in the New Museum’s Fourth Floor gallery, the exhibition debut a site-specific installation featuring a variety of new sculptures. Composed of materials including low-tech motors, pumping systems, steel rods, and PVC hoses filled with grease, glycerin, silicone, clay slip, and oil, Lee’s animatronic sculptures operate both like living organisms and biological machines. Drawing references from architecture, horror, pornography, and cybernetics, and evoking bodily functions and environmental decay, Lee offers an intuitive means to describe properties that exist between the realms of the technological and the corporeal: tenderness, desire, abjection, anxiety, and revulsion, among other states.

Titled after the Bulgarian-French feminist and semiotician Julia Kristeva’s 1987 book Black Sun—a study of depression and melancholia—Lee’s installation debuts a new body of kinetic sculptures housed in an architectural environment specially designed for the New Museum. Led by concerns of space, atmosphere, and materials, including fabric, steel, and clay, the tactile qualities of Lee’s newest work suggest emotional voids and psychological tensions. In recent exhibitions, Lee has created ambitious environments that create profoundly physical experiences for viewers. The dry and rattling mechanistic atmosphere of “Look, I’m a fountain of filth raving mad with love” at ZOLLAMTMMK, MMK Frankfurt (2022) was created through the use of abrasive mediums often found at construction sites, including cement, resin, steel, and plaster. In other projects, such as “The Milk of Dreams,” 59th International Art Exhibition, Venice Biennale (2022) and “Is it morning for you yet?” 58th Carnegie International (2022), Lee presents sculptures that variously spurt, drip, and ooze mysterious viscous liquids or that occupy and transform their enclosures. At the 2022 Busan Biennale, Lee’s monumental sculpture Landscape with Many Holes: Skins of Youngdo Sea was fabricated by draping acrylic mesh across scaffolding, creating a carcass-like structure resembling ripped flesh. For Lee, the process of creating these objects is way of evoking human biology and working through its psychosocial entanglements.