PRESENTATION: Mire Lee-Look, I’m a fountain of filth raving mad with love
Mire Lee’s works defy categorization, yet they are idiosyncratic, exuding energy that is entropic and full of polarizing, enticing and nauseating sentiments. Unsightly yet inexplicably sensational, Lee’s work challenges notions of selfhood, social acceptability, and cleanliness; obliterating societal conventions of aesthetics and desire in the face of her orgasmic, transgressive and kinetic technologies. Towels, chains, clay, silicon hoses, and steel structures coalesce to form an organism that is haptic, primordial, and yet highly mechanized.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: MMK Archive
South Korean artist Mire Lee is the recipient of the PONTOPREIS MMK 2022 and presents her installation “Look, I’m a fountain of filth raving mad with love”. Tubes, chains, and wires seem to resemble organic contraptions as they loop, glide, and snake around and into each other. These appliances are stiff or pliable when tension is applied, moving slowly yet fitfully. The water, oil, and grime flowing all around emphasizes the angular rigidity of the metal, while the plastic takes on a blurred appearance. In a pretechnological sense, Mire Lee’s installations recall a utopian horror that we seem to have long since rendered obsolete; they come across as humane in a way that contrasts with the cold, clean, digital technologies of the present day. People are more absent than ever in the face of these digital technologies, which makes the way they function even more brutal and inhuman. While the industrial nightmare seems increasingly to have faded out of sight in the West, it has become ever more ubiquitous in the Southern Hemisphere.
Mire Lee has earned a bachelor’s degree from the Department of Sculpture (2012) and a graduate degree in media art (2013) at the Seoul National University College of Fine Arts. Her recent solo exhibitions include Carriers at Art Sonje Center, Seoul (2020), words were never enough, Lily Roberts, Paris (2020), Het is of de stenen spreken, Casco Art Institute, Utrecht (2019) and War is Won by Sentiment Not by Soldiers, Insa Art Space, Seoul (2014). Both repulsive yet curiously compelling, Mire Lee’s kinetic sculptures explore notions of sexuality and desire. Common to Lee’s works is her use of silicone hoses and tubes, whose repetitive movements include transporting and extracting a milky, glutinous liquid. her kinetic sculptures typically involve simple mechanisms, enabling repetitions of movements that reflect her interest in anthropomorphic sculptures. While participating in the group exhibition “The Art of Not Landing” at Seoul’s Cake Gallery in 2016, the artist presented works including “Exercise for things with bones” (2016), which began as a small metal object that reminded Lee of legs. Fueled by a tiny motor, the kinetic sculpture causes the two horizontal parts of the objects to appear as though they are walking. As Lee continued to experiment with machinery and its evocation of the human body, her sculptures began to resemble living organisms. “Saboteurs”, exhibited at the 15th Lyon Biennale in 2019, consists of pumps, pipes, and tubes that contort and crawl across the floor while secreting a white mixture of glycerine and other viscous substances. Fetishes and erotic desires are recurring subjects in Mire Lee’s practice. In 2015, while staying in Paris for a residency, various city lockdowns following the Bataclan attacks led the artist to fixate on the media coverage of the attacks and grope porn—a genre of pornography in which unsuspecting young women are assaulted on public transport. Lee’s fascination with the genre would surface in her video installations such as “Andrea, in my mildest dreams” (2016) and “Andrea, Ophelia, at the endless house” (2018), which incorporate clips from pornographic videos before the ‘groping’ happens. “Vore”, short for vorarephilia, the fetish of being swallowed by or swallowing another, also appears in several of Lee’s works. The pipes and hoses in “Ophelia when you died” (2018) destruct themselves in a sequence of movements that evoke an abortion, while “i wanna be together” (2019) sees the artist stuff parts of artworks by other artists—including Kanitha Tith and Marie Rime—inside translucent tubes. In both works, the distance between one entity and the other is completely obliterated, causing them to become one. In “Carriers”, her 2020 solo exhibition at Art Sonje Center in Seoul, Mire Lee envisioned bodies and her sculptures as “carriers”. Resembling an animal’s intestines, the centrepiece “Carriers” (2020) repeatedly extracts, carries, and produces a viscous substance through its tubes. On the floor were a group of sculptures titled “Horizontal Forms”, also reminiscent of innards. In Venice Biennale 2022, she realized a new work that extends the concept of the carrier to a sculptural structure, laced with a pump and ceramic sculptures dotted with holes that ooze liquid clay, a substance that will dry, layer and crack over time. Accompanied by benches that double as sculptures, one of which also oozes mysterious viscous liquid, they also suggest the settings in which these bodily functions exist, producing an affective landscape, a house with holes.
Photo: Mire Lee, installation view “Look, I’m a fountain of filth raving mad with love”, 2022, photo: Axel Schneider
Info: Zollamt MMK, Domstraße 3, Frankfurt am Main, Germany, Duration: 20/5-5/9/2022, Days & Hours: Tue-Sun 11:00-18:00, www.mmk.art/
