Korean artist Mire Lee’s solo exhibition 《Mire Lee: The Heart of My Machine is Golden Lead》 is currently on view at Secession in Vienna, Austria.
 
Opened on June 26, 2026, the exhibition presents a large-scale installation that brings Lee’s sculptural language—developed through motors, pipes, industrial machinery, and flowing substances—into direct dialogue with Secession’s historic architecture and spatial structure.
 
In recent years, Lee has presented her work at major international art institutions and exhibitions, including Tate Modern, the New Museum, the Venice Biennale, and MMK Frankfurt. In this exhibition, she further expands the relationships between machine and body, operation and breakdown, and production and exhaustion into an immediate spatial experience. The exhibition continues through August 30.
 
 
 
The Heart of a Machine That Cannot Stop
 
Behind a massive slanted wall cutting across the center of the exhibition space, a large cement mixer with its interior cut open like a wound rotates slowly. Originally designed as an efficient piece of industrial machinery for mixing cement and aggregate at construction sites, the machine in Lee’s installation appears less like a properly functioning tool than an injured and exposed body.
 
Its heavy, repetitive sound spreads throughout the space like a heartbeat. Unable to stop and continuing to rotate, the machine remains suspended between vitality and malfunction, endurance and collapse.
 
PVC pipes extend across the exhibition space like blood vessels, circulating a red, viscous substance composed of iron oxide, brass powder, sawdust, and other materials. The liquid is mixed inside the cement mixer, travels through the pipes, and spills onto the walls and floor. Over the course of the exhibition, the material dries and hardens, forming layers that resemble rusted scabs and skin.
 
Rather than presenting a completed sculpture in a fixed state, the exhibition incorporates the circulation, accumulation, and gradual transformation of materials over time as part of the work itself. Visitors do not simply observe the installation but physically experience the sounds and movements of the machine, the viscosity and smell of the materials, and the changing atmosphere of the exhibition space.

Resistance to Technological Efficiency
 
Lee’s machines do not operate smoothly or precisely. Their motors, pipes, and rotating mechanisms creak, leak, and move as though struggling to sustain their own operation. Instead of the speed, efficiency, precision, and cleanliness pursued by modern technology, her work foregrounds friction, delay, contamination, and fatigue.
 
The machines evoke both industrial apparatuses that produce endlessly in place of humans and bodies exhausted by repetitive labor. The phrase “my machine” in the exhibition title can be read not only as referring to an external technological apparatus but also as overlapping with the human body as it endures the pressures of repetitive production, labor, and creation.
 
The machine’s heart therefore suggests both the force that enables it to operate and a body that has internalized the pressure of production and labor that cannot be stopped. In Lee’s work, machine and human are not opposing entities. Instead, they overlap as parts of a complex organism that shares fatigue, desire, vulnerability, and imperfection.

Golden Lead: The Coexistence of Beauty and Toxicity
 
At the rear of the exhibition space are large banners previously used to promote past exhibitions at Secession. Fragments of lettering covered in brass leaf and lines and patterns made with lead-containing solder are layered over the banners.
 
The work connects the decorative, golden visual language of Gustav Klimt’s permanently installed 《Beethoven Frieze》 at Secession with industrial heat, toxicity, and material residue.

Lead was once widely used in architecture, crafts, cosmetics, decoration, and numerous other fields. It was valued for its malleability and lustrous appearance, but today it is classified as a toxic material that causes serious harm to both human health and the environment. The phrase “Golden Lead” in the exhibition title refers to this contradictory substance, which possesses both an alluring brilliance and lethal toxicity.
 
Lee presents the radiance of lead as a form of beauty that can no longer be desired innocently. Rather than serving as a symbol of splendor and glory, it appears as a melancholic residue left behind by past desires and industrial civilization.
 
The exhibition reveals that beauty and danger, ornament and contamination, cannot be separated from one another. In doing so, it invites viewers to reconsider Secession’s historic decorative language through the material and social conditions of the present.
 
 
 
From the Interior of the Body to the Structure of Society
 
Rather than directly reproducing the external appearance of the human body, Lee translates the body’s internal mechanisms into mechanical structures. The pipes circulating liquid, the rotating mixer, the exposed interior of the machine, and the sediment accumulating on its surfaces evoke blood, organs, bodily fluids, and skin.
 
At the same time, the work can be read as a metaphor for the structures of production and labor in contemporary society. The machine, which rotates continuously without producing a clearly defined result, appears like a being trapped in a cycle of repetitive labor and exhaustion. Its repeated operation becomes both a sign of vitality and a movement anticipating fatigue and collapse.
 
In this sense, Lee’s machines do more than simply blur the boundaries between life and nonlife, or between human beings and technology. The work demonstrates how human bodies and emotions, labor and desire, are already deeply intertwined with technological systems.
 
The entire exhibition space operates like a vast organism in which machine and body work, wear themselves down, and continually transform together.
 
 
 
Mire Lee’s Sculpture Encounters the History of Secession
 
Secession is an independent, nonprofit, artist-led exhibition institution founded in 1897 by artists of the Vienna Secession, including Gustav Klimt, Josef Hoffmann, and Koloman Moser, who broke away from the conservative art establishment.
 
The inscription on the building’s façade—“To every age its art, to every art its freedom”—symbolizes Secession’s founding spirit of pursuing new forms of art beyond the authority of established institutions.
 
Lee does not use Secession’s history and architecture merely as a backdrop for the exhibition. Several glass panels in the ceiling have been removed to allow natural light to enter the gallery, while a monumental slanted wall divides the space and conceals the cement mixer behind it.
 
She also uses banners from previous Secession exhibitions and the decorative forms of Klimt’s 《Beethoven Frieze》 as both physical materials and points of reference.
 
The exhibition reinterprets Secession’s historical associations with artistic freedom and progress through contemporary conditions of industrial contamination, exhaustion, and bodily vulnerability. At the point where this symbolic space of European modern art encounters Lee’s imperfect and contaminated machinery, technology and ornament—once symbols of progress—can no longer remain pure ideals.
 
The exhibition demonstrates how Lee continues to transform her sculptural language in response to the history and architecture of a particular site, even after achieving significant international recognition.
 
Following the 2024 Tate Modern Turbine Hall Commission 《Open Wound》, the exhibition demonstrates how Lee’s use of large-scale machinery has expanded to encompass not only architectural space but also the history of a site and the cultural meanings embedded in materials.
 
 
 
From Vienna to Amsterdam
 
Two exhibitions of Mire Lee’s work are being presented simultaneously at Secession and the Korean Cultural Center in Austria. At the Korean Cultural Center, 《Women I loved》 presents a separate selection of the artist’s video works.
 
By presenting the installation at Secession, centered on machines and industrial materials, alongside her moving-image works, the two exhibitions offer a broader perspective on the themes of the body, women, desire, and memory embedded in Lee’s practice.
 
Elements from the Secession exhibition will be incorporated into a new site-specific installation scheduled to open at Oude Kerk in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, in November 2026.
 
Rather than being completed within a single exhibition, the work is dismantled, relocated, and transformed as it encounters a different architectural environment. In this respect, the fluid and cyclical character of Lee’s sculpture continues into its next iteration.

Artist | Mire Lee
 
Mire Lee was born in Seoul in 1988 and currently lives and works between Seoul and Amsterdam. She majored in sculpture and completed a second major in media art at Seoul National University.
 
Through sculptures and large-scale installations combining motors, steel, silicone, cement, clay, oil, and piping systems, Lee explores the relationships between body and machine, desire and vulnerability, and formation and collapse.
 
Her major exhibitions include the two-person exhibition 《HR Giger & Mire Lee》 at Schinkel Pavillon in Berlin in 2021; the solo exhibition 《Look, I’m a fountain of filth raving mad with love》 at MMK Zollamt in Frankfurt in 2022; 《Black Sun》 at the New Museum in New York in 2023; and the Hyundai Commission 《Open Wound》 at Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall in London from 2024 to 2025.
 
In 2026, Lee presented 《The (PSYCHO)SOMATIC ZONE》 at the Institut d’art contemporain in Villeurbanne, France, and is currently holding her solo exhibition at Secession in Vienna.

Institution | Secession
 
Secession is an independent, nonprofit, artist-led exhibition institution founded in Austria in 1897 by members of the Vienna Secession, including Gustav Klimt, Josef Hoffmann, and Koloman Moser.
 
It is widely known for its building, designed by Josef Maria Olbrich and completed in 1898, as well as Gustav Klimt’s 《Beethoven Frieze》.
 
Today, Secession continues to maintain a structure in which artists participate directly in the institution’s governance and exhibition programming. It supports experimental solo exhibitions and the production of new works by international contemporary artists.
 
As a place where historical architecture and contemporary artistic practices continually collide and enter into dialogue, Secession is regarded as one of the most important symbolic spaces in European modern and contemporary art.
 
 
 
Exhibition Information
 
Exhibition Title: 《Mire Lee: The Heart of My Machine is Golden Lead》
Dates: June 26–August 30, 2026
Venue: Secession, Vienna, Austria
Opening hours: Tuesday–Sunday, 10 a.m.–6 p.m.
Curator: Haris Giannouras
 
Concurrent exhibition: Mire Lee, 《Women I loved》
Dates: June 26–August 30, 2026
Venue: Korean Cultural Center in Austria
Opening hours: Tuesday–Sunday, 12 p.m.–6 p.m.
 
Upcoming exhibition: Mire Lee, Oude Kerk, Amsterdam
Dates: November 13, 2026–March 14, 2027