Mire Lee | 身体、欲望与机械 —— 有机与异质的共鸣
Mire Lee | Body, Desire, and the Machine —
Resonances of the Organic and the Other
Writer: kingking
Date: 10/24/2024
Keywords: organic / machine / body / post-industry / hybridity
Date: 10/24/2024
Keywords: organic / machine / body / post-industry / hybridity
Mire Lee 的个展包括：2023 年于纽约新美术馆举办的《Black Sun》、2022 年于纽约 Tina Kim 画廊举办的《Carriers》、2022 年在法兰克福 MMK ZOLLAMT 举办的《Look, I'm a fountain of filth raving mad with love》，以及 2020 年在首尔 Art Sonje Center 举办的《Carriers》。她还参加了多个群展，如 2022 年第 11 届釜山双年展、2022 年第 59 届威尼斯双年展、2022 年第 58 届卡内基国际、2021 年柏林 Schinkel Pavilion、2020 年上海天线空间、2019 年第 15 届里昂双年展、2019 年首尔 Art Sonje，以及 2018 年第 12 届光州双年展馆项目。她在当代艺术领域的贡献获得了多项认可，包括 2022 年的 PONTOPREIS MMK 奖，并入围了 2021 年未来世代艺术奖特别奖。
Mire Lee (b. Korea) is a contemporary artist whose practice probes the entangled relations between the industrial and the affective, the machinic and the corporeal. A graduate of Seoul National University’s Department of Sculpture, Lee draws upon feminist and queer theory as well as architectural discourse and cybernetics to interrogate the tensions between organic life and mechanical systems. Her installations, often composed of motorized apparatuses in combination with fabric, liquid clay, and other mutable substances, articulate a hybrid visual language where the organic and inorganic interpenetrate. In doing so, her work foregrounds both the precarity and resilience of the human subject within broader social and technological systems.
Lee has presented solo exhibitions including Black Sun (New Museum, New York, 2023); Carriers (Tina Kim Gallery, New York, 2022); Look, I’m a fountain of filth raving mad with love (MMK Zollamt, Frankfurt, 2022); and Carriers (Art Sonje Center, Seoul, 2020). Her work has also been featured in numerous group exhibitions, such as the 11th Busan Biennale (2022), the 59th Venice Biennale (2022), the 58th Carnegie International (2022), Schinkel Pavilion, Berlin (2021), Antenna Space, Shanghai (2020), the 15th Lyon Biennale (2019), Art Sonje Center, Seoul (2019), and the 12th Gwangju Biennale Pavilion Project (2018). Her contributions to contemporary art have been recognized through several distinctions, including the PONTOPREIS MMK Award in 2022, as well as her nomination for the Future Generation Art Prize’s Special Prize in 2021.
Hyundai Commission: Mire Lee: Open Wound, Installation View. Photo © Tate (Oliver Cowling with Lucy Green)
泰特现代美术馆漩涡大厅近期正在举办韩国艺术家Mire Lee的展览 Hyundai Commission: Open Wound 。Lee将泰特现代美术馆重新想象为一个“工业子宫”，借助这一场地曾经作为发电站的历史背景，展览 Open Wound 将漩涡大厅呈现为一个“Living Factory”，在庞大的机械系统中展现人类的梦想与欲望。
The Turbine Hall at Tate Modern is currently hosting the exhibition Hyundai Commission: Open Wound by Korean artist Mire Lee. Lee reimagines the museum space as an “industrial womb,” drawing upon the site’s history as a former power station. In Open Wound, the Turbine Hall is transformed into a “Living Factory,” where vast mechanical systems become a visceral stage for articulating human dreams and desires.
Lee用“皮肤”般的织物雕塑填满了大厅，这些雕塑通过金属链条悬挂在空中，与天花板上的机动涡轮和缓缓流动的黏稠液体相结合。这些液体从硅胶触手中流入下方，新“皮肤”被涡轮润湿后晾干并再次悬挂。随着时间推移，这些“皮肤”逐渐积累，象征着工业系统中生产与衰败的循环，作品也仿佛是对工业历史瞬间的拼贴。织物“皮肤”的晾干过程令人联想到纺织业，而悬挂的链条则受到煤矿工人集体洗浴设施的启发。Tate Modern曾是Bankside发电站，Lee的作品激活了建筑中沉睡的工业元素，仿佛唤醒了工业过去的幽灵。在工业革命中，工人们逐渐被机器取代，Lee通过这些“皮肤”象征现代的身份与经历，质问博物馆在今天所创造的价值。
Lee inundates the Turbine Hall with fabric sculptures resembling fragments of corporeal “skin,” suspended on heavy chains and interlaced with motorized turbines and streams of viscous fluid that seep through silicone appendages. These synthetic skins undergo a cyclical choreography—dampened, dried, and re-suspended—embodying an allegory of industrial production and systemic decay. The iterative accumulation of these forms gestures toward material agency, positioning matter itself as both a witness to and an actor within processes of transformation.The reference to drying textiles invokes the genealogy of the textile industry as a crucible of modern capitalism, while the chains recall infrastructures of labor discipline such as miners’ communal bathing facilities. In reactivating the latent industrial residues of the former Bankside Power Station, Lee conjures what might be described as the hauntology of the industrial past, animating its spectral remains within the museum’s contemporary frame.Her installation unfolds as a biopolitical allegory, situating the human body in a post-industrial condition where labor is relentlessly reconfigured by machinic systems. By mobilizing the fragile yet persistent metaphor of “skin,” Lee interrogates not only the historical substitution of workers by machines during the Industrial Revolution, but also the museum’s role as a contemporary apparatus of value production—questioning what forms of life, identity, and experience are rendered visible, and which remain obscured, within its institutional circuits.
Black Sun, 2023, mixed-media installation, dimensions variable, New Museum, New York City
Lee的创作从女性主义和酷儿理论中汲取灵感，她常通过“梦与遥远的记忆”，探讨情感的混乱与共鸣，痛苦与恐惧。2023年，Lee曾在美国New Museum举办了展览 Black Sun 。展览标题 Black Sun 取自Julia Kristeva于1987年出版的关于忧郁的经典著作。正如这位保加利亚裔法国女权主义者和符号学家所描述的，个体在抑郁的状态中无法与外界沟通，Lee的雕塑则通过不可渗透的实体存在，呈现出一种环境腐朽、情感空虚与心理紧张的深刻隐喻。
Lee’s practice draws inspiration from feminist and queer theory, often engaging with “dreams and distant memories” to probe the entanglements of affective chaos and resonance, pain and fear. In 2023, she presented the exhibition Black Sunat the New Museum in New York. The title, Black Sun, references Julia Kristeva’s seminal 1987 text on melancholia. As the Bulgarian-French feminist theorist and semiotician describes, the depressive subject becomes unable to communicate with the external world. Lee’s sculptures materialize this psychic condition through impermeable corporeal forms, serving as metaphors for environmental decay, emotional vacancy, and psychological tension.
这一场域特定的装置艺术占据了博物馆的四楼，将其彻底转化为一个由仿生雕塑主导的建筑环境。这些雕塑既像具有生命特质的有机体，又具备生物机器般的运作方式。Lee从建筑学、恐怖美学和控制论等领域汲取灵感，构建出这些雕塑。她精心挑选了Sahco的Cocoon面料和Kvadrat Febrik的Apparel面料，切割后浸入液态陶土，以重塑器官的形态，透过马达、泵送系统和钢杆等元素，将人体功能与科技世界无缝融合。在装置中行走的观众，犹如穿越一个有机体的内脏系统，沉浸在欲望、厌恶、焦虑与温柔交织的多重情感体验中。
This site-specific installation occupies the museum’s fourth floor, radically transforming it into an architectural environment animated by biomimetic sculptures. These forms oscillate between the semblance of living organisms and the operations of bio-machines. Drawing upon architecture, the aesthetics of horror, and cybernetics, Lee constructs these entities through carefully selected materials—Sahco’s Cocoon fabric and Kvadrat Febrik’s Apparel textile—cut, immersed in liquid clay, and reshaped into organ-like structures. Integrated with motors, pumping systems, and steel rods, the sculptures merge corporeal functions with technological apparatuses. As visitors move through the installation, they traverse what feels like the viscera of a living organism, immersed in an affective matrix where desire, disgust, anxiety, and tenderness coalesce.
Black Sun, 2023, mixed-media installation, dimensions variable, New Museum, New York City
Lee一直尝试突破自己实践的边界，在2022年的釜山双年展上，Lee进一步拓展了对于“集体记忆与个体经验的交织”的思考。Lee的作品 Landscape with Many Holes: Skins of Young-do Sea 被置于曾由松冈重工使用的船舶制造厂房中，该建筑部分屋顶和墙壁因台风受损，暴露了其内部结构。柔软的织物通过机械运动悬挂在空间中，如波浪般起伏，象征着身份认同与文化传承在全球化背景下的流动与变化，描绘了集体历史中的痛苦与希望。
Lee persistently seeks to extend the boundaries of her practice. At the 2022 Busan Biennale, she further developed her inquiry into the entanglement of collective memory and individual experience. Landscape with Many Holes: Skins of Young-do Sea was installed within a former shipbuilding factory once operated by Matsuoka Heavy Industries. Parts of the roof and walls, damaged by typhoons, exposed the building’s inner structure. Soft textiles, suspended and animated by mechanical motion, undulated like waves, symbolizing the fluidity and transformation of identity and cultural inheritance within a globalized condition. The work articulated both the pain and the hope inscribed in collective histories.
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Landscape with Many Holes: Skins of Young-do Sea, 2022, Scaffolding, wasted oil, fence fabric(construction mesh), scaffold scale 1620 x 2160 x 1660 (cm), dimension variable, Courtesy of the artist and Busan Biennale
这种对于脆弱与变化的探索在同年的第58届卡内基国际展览中得到了进一步延续。Lee展出的作品 Untitled My Pittsburgh Sculpture（2022）延续了她对“变化中的脆弱性”的关注。通过机械结构和有机材质的结合，Lee创造出一种既陌生又熟悉的环境，仿佛是一个不断生成和衰亡的生态系统。机械的拟人化处理使作品充满生命感，展现了个体在巨大社会机器中的无力与挣扎，同时也表现了人类在面对变化时的坚韧与适应。
This inquiry into fragility and transformation was further extended in the same year at the 58th Carnegie International. Lee’s work Untitled My Pittsburgh Sculpture (2022) continued her engagement with the theme of “vulnerability in flux.” Through the conjunction of mechanical structures and organic materials, she constructed an environment at once estranging and familiar, evoking an ecosystem in perpetual emergence and decay. The anthropomorphic treatment of machinic elements imbued the work with a visceral sense of vitality, reflecting both the powerlessness and struggle of the individual within vast social machinery, while simultaneously affirming human resilience and adaptability in the face of change.
Untitled (My Pittsburgh Sculpture), 2022, Metal, silicone oil, silicone, dosing pumps, steel wire ropes, barbed wire bits,
and other mixed media, decagon sculpture scale 60 x 60 x 575 (cm), dimensions variable, Courtesy of the artist and Carnegie Museum of Art
对于Lee而言，变化和脆弱的交织贯穿她的艺术创作，在威尼斯双年展的The Arsenale展区中，她的作品 Endless House: Holes and Drips 以“生命体的状态”为核心，液体与有机材料的结合，展现出一个生命体不断变化的状态。“洞”和“滴”的意象不仅探索了内外之间的边界，也隐喻了人类在社会系统中的脆弱与顽强。不断滴落的液体形成了动态的有机结构，带领观众体验生命的脆弱与再生，强调人在宏大系统中的生存状态。
For Lee, the entanglement of transformation and fragility permeates her artistic practice. At the Venice Biennale, within the Arsenale, her work Endless House: Holes and Drips centered on the “state of the living organism.” Through the integration of liquid and organic materials, the installation articulated the ceaseless mutability of life itself. The imagery of “holes” and “drips” not only probed the threshold between interior and exterior, but also allegorized the simultaneous vulnerability and resilience of the human subject within social systems. The continuous dripping of liquid generated dynamic organic structures, immersing viewers in an experience of both fragility and regeneration, underscoring the precarious condition of survival within larger systemic forces.
Endless House: Holes and Drips, 2022, Multiple ceramic sculptures on a scaffold, lithium carbonate and iron oxide glaze liquid,
pump, motor and other mixed media, scaffold scale 1.8 x 2 x 4 m, dimension variable, The Milk of Dreams, The Arsenale, Venice Biennale
pump, motor and other mixed media, scaffold scale 1.8 x 2 x 4 m, dimension variable, The Milk of Dreams, The Arsenale, Venice Biennale
Lee的创作是一种对社会结构和个体情感的深刻反思，她不断以独特的方式将工业、机械与有机体结合，形成充满对立与融合的艺术景观。她通过构建视觉和情感的双重叙事，将观众带入一个不断变化的世界，在这个世界中，机械的冷漠与情感的柔软相互交织。通过对物质、空间和运动的细致探索，Lee的作品质疑了人类在现代社会中的身份及其意义。她将个人的脆弱、集体的记忆以及情感的复杂性通过有形的艺术语言表达出来，揭示出个体与社会之间不可分割的张力。
Lee’s practice constitutes a profound reflection on social structures and individual affect. She persistently fuses the industrial, the mechanical, and the organic in ways that generate landscapes of both conflict and convergence. By constructing narratives that are at once visual and emotional, she immerses viewers in a perpetually shifting world where the cold indifference of machinery intertwines with the softness of human feeling. Through her meticulous engagement with matter, space, and movement, Lee interrogates the meaning of human identity within the conditions of modern society. Her work renders vulnerability, collective memory, and the complexities of affect into a tangible artistic language, exposing the inseparable tensions between the individual and the social order.
"The Complicits", towards the end of the presentation, Photo© Dae Young Koi