What Mire Lee Is Bringing to the Tate Turbine Hall

Dream last night: A small, round, silver thing has sprouted in my face. It’s the size and shape of a single tine of a fork, below my right eye. It looks like it’s made of metal, but as I pull on it, it lengthens and goes soft and wide and becomes like an octopus tentacle without suction cups. I pull and pull and it keeps coming out of my face. In the dream, I am horrified and fascinated as it unscrolls, stretchy and pearlescent, down to my belly button. Then I wake abruptly. My hand moves up to touch my cheek, instinctively, and there is disappointment that I find it, in real life, to be smooth.

I had this dream while researching Mire Lee’s work. I was really into her blog, which has images of anime porn, amputees and what I think is a cooked pig’s foot squashed against a grill rack. Lee makes kinetic sculpture – kind of animatronic machines – and installations that move, churn, drip, squirt and wobble. The materials include pumps, motors and PVC hoses filled with grease, glycerine, silicone, slip and oil. Although all are animated, some have had their movements arrested. Made of epoxy, silicone or clay that’s hardened on to fabrics and hung from the wall or ceiling, they look like flayed skins, hides, entrails. It has been noted that Lee’s work smells.

Watching the ones that move feels like watching sad machines, limping little things (even if they are room-sized) trying to prove themselves. There’s a cute pathetic-ness. There are the obvious art-historical references: Eva Hesse, Louise Bourgeois, Tim Hawkinson; I also think of Senga Nengudi and Rebecca Horn, artists who take over rooms and make them into worlds. Movies like Mamoru Oshii’s Ghost in the Shell (1995), Shinya Tsukamoto’s Tetsuo: The Iron Man (1989), and David Cronenberg’s body horror make an atmosphere. Even if I didn’t know about the two-person exhibition of Lee’s work with that of H.R. Giger (at the Schinkel Pavilion in Berlin in 2021–22), I already found myself in the scene in James Cameron’s Aliens (1986) where the crew finds the lair of eggs, and then look up in terror to see that the queen alien’s glowing, semi-translucent ovipositor, a huge tube like an air-conditioning duct, is producing dozens more.

Lee has said she wants her pieces to fail and collapse, to be crude and wild, as a sort of metaphor for how emotions can be too much. Her bio on Tina Kim Gallery’s website begins, ‘Mire Lee is known to create kinetic sculptural installations that appear shabby, ridiculous, and precarious.’ What strikes me about this statement is trying to think of kinetic sculptural installations that are not that. Suddenly, I am aware of how artificial and forced such work feels when it assumes control and elegance, its materials crafted and sheened; I can only see the labour and production costs, the engineering wizardry, the brute strength of alchemizing raw stuff into polished forms.

In an interview with frieze in 2022, Lee said that sculpture is stupid: ‘I’ve always loved the rigidity, or stupidity as I like to think of it, of sculpture as a medium – there’s so much of it that’s hard to alter.’ I love a sculptor saying that sculpture is stupid. I wonder about the relationship between stupidity and beauty. Is it stronger than the relationship between stupidity and ugliness? What I mean is, Lee’s work produces something grotesque, monstrous, and uncanny because it relies on, stands on top of, a dominant mode of normative beauty. Would we see the ugliness if we did not see it next to an ideal that is pure, clean, smooth, and functional? When will we get out from under this binary of beautiful/ugly?

Lee’s work evokes bodies – not ‘the body’, but bodies plural: there’s the feeling of cancerous growth, obscene proliferation, infestation. I know I should say something here about abjection, that Julia Kristeva should appear. (After all, Lee’s exhibition at the New Museum in New York in 2023 was titled ‘Black Sun’, after Kristeva’s 1987 book.) But what strikes me most is that the squish and ick and bulbous feel of Lee’s work is grounded in a practical materialism that insists on the disgusting-ness of bodies as an ontology. Rather than abjection, it simply suggests a default position. What else is a body if not gross? Is that a radical thought? For me, it’s a no-brainer: that we know it’s a body because of how repulsive it is – the leaks, stinks, telos toward decay. All the writing on Lee’s work that I’ve read lingers on the element of the grotesque, but for me, I can only see the beautiful ghost that animates it. Isn’t the ghost of beauty beauty itself?

This article first appeared in Frieze Week, Seoul 2024 under the title ‘Loving the Alien.’

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_{Main image: Mire Lee, Look, I’m a fountain of filth raving mad with love, 2022. Courtesy: the artist and Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt; photograph: Axel Schneider}