Mire Lee (b.1988) creates sculptures using industrial and mechanical materials such as cement, resin, steel, scaffolding, motors, and pumps. Her works foreground materiality, texture, and mechanical movement. Emitting sticky, viscous substances and moving like living organisms, her large-scale kinetic sculptures evoke primal human desires and sensations that lie beyond the realms of intellect or language.

From the outset of her practice, Mire Lee has explored a wide range of materials, showing a strong interest in their physical properties and the processes involved in working with them. In her first solo exhibition 《War Isn’t Won by Soldiers It’s Won by Sentiment》 (2014) at Insa Art Space, she presented early works that employed raw and loosely structured materials to express her personal sensations and everyday experiences.

For example, in A Cabinet for Chinese Scholar’s Stones (2014), Lee displayed fragments of discarded objects and waste materials—chosen for their texture, volume, weight, and elasticity—as if they were ornamental scholar’s rocks. Tears (2014), based on a fleeting moment in which the artist cried while listening to a Chopin sonata, featured a dimly lit room filled with classical music, where viewers gazed out a window at two minimal pieces of Styrofoam.

Rather than refining materials into smooth forms, Mire Lee has developed a visceral and irrational sculptural language by loosely intertwining raw textures to construct her own narrative structures. This approach culminated in her introduction of quasi-bodily sculptures made of clay for the first time in her 2017 exhibition 《READ MY LIPS》 at Hapjeongjigu.

In A Hysteria, Elegance, Catharsis; the islands (2017), Lee used clay to form fleshy head-like shapes, supported by knee-height steel tripod structures that resembled bones. Silicone hoses coated in grease were loosely attached to the heads, and as they slowly rotated via motor, the tubes twisted and unraveled repeatedly. During this process, the sculpture struck against its own body and the corners of the exhibition space, smearing lubricant and leaving behind a glistening mess.

Following her artificial-body-machine sculptures that evoke bodily organs and move incessantly, Mire Lee has said she became increasingly fascinated by the vulnerability, uncertainty, and sense of liberation that soft materials evoke. Art Critic Jinsil Lee interprets this notion of liberation as a “non-subjective liberation that arises from the possibility of malfunction or failure—when the work escapes the artist’s control,” and as “an ontological liberation of the abject, of sculptures destined to be soiled and discarded.”

Hysteria, Elegance, Catharsis: Words Were Never Enough (2018), presented in the Palais de Tokyo Pavilion at the Gwangju Biennale, marks a more explicit expression of this ontological sense of liberation.

The work is a massive 10-meter-long kinetic sculpture, suspended from the ceiling trusses and oozing orange-tinted silicone oil reminiscent of rust. A tangled mass of body-like forms—composed of thin hoses that evoke skin and blood vessels—hung precariously, its heart being a system of pumps and motors that operated until they overheated and could no longer function.

In Saboteurs (2019), presented at the 15th Biennale de Lyon, Mire Lee intensified the fragmentary and fragile nature of her materials by incorporating fabric, tissue paper, and wet wipes, and by smearing and soaking the surfaces with fluids such as grease and glycerin—deliberately giving the work the raw and abject appearance of discarded waste.

Unlike conventional large-scale kinetic sculptures that often exude a sense of weight and grandeur, Lee’s piece writhed slowly with the turn of a motor, as fragments of its soft, skin-like surfaces gradually detached from the body, revealing a dirty, vulnerable, and pitiful condition.

That same year, as part of the “SeMA–Project S” program at the Seoul Museum of Art, Mire Lee created the large-scale semi-permanent kinetic installation i wanna be together (2019), built around the concept of "devouring." For this work, Lee combined artworks and byproducts she received from fellow artists with soft materials such as silicone, vinyl, and fabric.

The resulting form resembles a mass of flesh, staged to appear as though it is devouring the collaborators’ works by pulling them into a rotating elliptical structure. Each individual piece is absorbed into the inner sphere, seemingly striving to become one—but the union is only temporary, never permanent, and never fully whole. 

In an interview, Mire Lee remarked that the work “seems to reveal the human desire not to be alone by creating a duty of care that must be shared with others.”

In her 2020 solo exhibition 《Mire Lee: Carriers》 at the Art Sonje Center, the artist further explored the desire to become one with others through the subcultural genre of “vore.”

“Vore” is short for “vorarephilia,” a fetishistic fascination with the act of swallowing—or being swallowed by—a living being whole. It is a form of unreproducible desire, one that aims to nullify the very distance between self and other by completely consuming the living subject.

This concept is metaphorically embodied through the sculptural language of the artist. The large-scale kinetic sculpture Carriers (2020), powered by hose pumps, resembles the digestive tract of an animal.

The sculpture repeatedly performs the motions of suction, transport, and extraction of a viscous substance. As the slimy material travels through the structure, sounds are emitted in sync with the machine’s movement, evoking the image of a creature forcing its way through a narrow passage and emerging from within.

Meanwhile, beside this sculpture that moves like a living body, the sculpture Horizontal Forms (2020) lay on the floor, low and elongated, with a limited range of energy activation. The "lying" position is not a dead state but requires only minimal energy compared to other bodily movements or postures, representing a vulnerable state of being alive, susceptible to attack.

As the gaze shifts to the projected video work Sleeping mom (2020), the viewer is suddenly drawn into the artist's private realm, and the posture of the 'mom' in the video naturally overlaps with the positioning of the 'lying' sculpture.

Mire Lee juxtaposes sculptures in forms of both movement and lying down, presenting the duality of human existence through a dialectic of sculptural language. Additionally, her works, with the exhibition title “Carriers,” metaphorically evoke the primal movements of various substances within the body—such as blood, fetuses, pathogens, and nutrients—suggesting an experience that intersects with the world from the most intimate and bodily place of sensation.

Since her 2020 solo exhibition 《Carriers》, Mire Lee has increasingly emphasized the material's non-conformity by blending machines with soft materials, bringing her abject aesthetics—where negative emotions are expressed—into sharper focus.

Her abject sculptures, with their sticky, bodily skins in motion, constantly discard the external layer of "self" and return to a primal state, where the dualities of machine and organism, life and death, the beauty of cycles and the fear of life's finitude, intertwine.

In Mire Lee's New York debut solo exhibition 《Black Sun》 (2023) at the New Museum, she presented a site-specific installation piece titled Black Sun (2023), inspired by architecture, horror, pornography, and cybernetics. The dynamic sculpture, composed of motors, pump systems, steel rods, and PVC hoses filled with glycerin, silicone, slip, and oil, functions like a living organism and biological machine.

This work was created based on Julia Kristeva's 1987 book Black Sun, which explores depression and melancholia. Kristeva argues that for those in a melancholic state, time appears to stand still.

In Mire Lee's machine-body sculptures, the cement that flows thickly from the body is bound to harden and stop over time. However, despite this, it seems to slowly move, as if trying to expel negative emotions such as fear, depression, ennui, and sadness from within. Through the deformal material properties and tactile qualities of her sculptures, Lee mourns psychological loss alongside emotional voids.

In 2024, Mire Lee's large-scale skin sculptures installed in the Turbine Hall of the Tate Modern in London drew attention to the historical context of British industry, particularly the building's past as a power plant. The skin sculptures hung from the ceiling of the exhibition space, draped down, while at the far end of the Turbine Hall, a 7-meter-long turbine was suspended from an old crane that had been temporarily reactivated.

Surrounding the rotating turbine was a silicone tube emitting a deep pink liquid, which collected in a tray installed beneath the tube. Fiber fragments resembling construction mesh absorbed the liquid, creating new skin sculptures.

During the exhibition, the sculptures created on-site were moved by technicians to drying racks, evoking the image of artisans at work, yet simultaneously resembling a factory production line. The artist discovered a human element in the slowly rotating turbines, and through the gradual accumulation of 'skin' sculptures, the building appeared to shed its exterior over time. This process brought to the surface the hidden traces of industrialization and the presence of the workers who once inhabited the space.

Mire Lee's sculptures, which blur the boundary between outer and inner layers, skin and internal organs, evoke both the primitive and the highly sophisticated mechanisms of machinery. The grotesque figures of her sculptures, slowly crawling along the floor or continuously sucking and expelling through hoses, transcend the categorization of sculpture, leaning into a pathos-filled violence, the pleasure of repetitive movement, and an aesthetic of sensitivity where the finiteness of life, pathos-driven desire, and frustration coexist.

"Extremely vulnerable beings, with no protective barrier between themselves and the world, I thought of them as strong in the opposite sense, and I wanted to reveal that." (Mire Lee, 2022 Venice Biennale Interview) 

Mire Lee lives and works between Seoul, South Korea and Amsterdam, Netherlands. She has earned a bachelor’s degree from the Department of Sculpture and a graduate degree in media art at the Seoul National University College of Fine Arts. Her recent solo exhibitions include 《Mire Lee: Open Wound》 (2024) the Hyundai Turbine Hall Commission at Tate Modern, London; 《Black Sun》 (2023) at the New Museum, New York; 《Look, I’m a fountain of filth raving mad with love》 (2022) at ZOLLAMTMMK, MMK Frankfurt; 《As we laydying》 (2022) at Kunstmuseum Den Haag, Den Haag; 《Carriers》 (2020) at Art Sonje Center, Seoul, amongst others.
 
Lee’s work was also featured in several group exhibitions including the 11th Busan Biennale (2022), 59th International Venice Biennale (2022), 58th Carnegie International (2022), Schinkel Pavilion, Berlin (2021), Antenna Space, Shanghai (2020), the 15th Biennale de Lyon, Lyon (2019), and the 12th Gwangju Biennale Pavilion Project (2018).
 
Lee has participated in notable residencies, including the SeMA Nanji Residency and Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris. In addition, she was the recipient of the PONTOPREIS MMK 2022 prize, and was shortlisted for the Special Prize at the 2021 Future Generation Art Prize. Her works are held in prestigious collections such as the Centre Pompidou in Paris, LACMA, M+, Leeum Museum of Art, and the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea.

References

• 이미래, Mire Lee (Artist Website)
• 티나킴 갤러리, 이미래 (Tina Kim Gallery, Mire Lee)
• 한국문화예술위원회, 작가 조사-연구-비평 : 이미래
• 월간미술, 이미래: 열린 상처의 끝에는 애틋한 장력이 – 전민지 
• 인사미술공간, 낭만쟁취 (Insa Art Space, War Isn’t Won by Soldiers It’s Won by Sentiment)
• 서울시립미술관, [SeMA-프로젝트 S] 2019 같이 있고 싶다고
• Seminar, 이미래 인터뷰: 감정 포털로서의 비정형 조각
• 아트선재센터, 이미래: 캐리어즈 (Art Sonje Center, Mire Lee: Carriers) 
• ACK, 우리는 역겨운 것에 마음이 끌려 – 정재연
• 현대자동차, 《현대 커미션: 이미래: Open Wound》展 개막
• 한경, 베네치아 비엔날레 거장 작품 속 빛나는 한국 젊은 여성작가, 2022.04.21