Mire Lee

There’s so much that you cannot – and, perhaps, should never – articulate.

To me, it carries the warmth of the womb and the darkness of a torture chamber at the same time. I also keep coming back to it because it’s an architectural project that was never realized, so it has the potential to be as large as I want it to be in my head. Just as the title says: it’s the interior without an end, in which everything is connected.

Perhaps that sentiment is related to the medium of sculpture or kinetics: when something is too tragic or too difficult or too painful, the absurdity of it forces you to laugh.

Lee’s work probes human hopes and fears surrounding technological progress. She exposes the tensions between popular fantasies of an automated future and the unavoidable decay of matter over time.

As the factory runs, new skins are wetted under the turbine, then moved by technicians to harden on nearby racks before being hauled into the air. Over time they will accumulate, ‘birthed’ from the body of the building while appearing to ‘shed’ from the ceiling above.

For Lee, the complex histories of industry are awe-inspiring in their violence and scale. Her work considers the physical and emotional labour of people living in times of precarity and decline; ‘witnessing a human, an individual life, getting caught in a larger system.’

. I am Korean, which is something I can’t do anything about, but my practice doesn’t have the capacity to shed light on any particularly interesting aspect of what it means to be Korean. My work can’t serve or do something for this subject matter; it’s just a fact.

being moved is the strongest thing you can experience through art.

Ultimately, I am interested in how behind all human actions there is something soft and vulnerable such as sincerity, hope, compassion, love, and wanting to be loved.