2024-10-08
This autumn, Lee will take over the vast space of Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall, having been awarded the prestigious Tate Hyundai Commission. She tells me the work evokes miners’ changing rooms and is “really for people — for people to enjoy and just be around.” Lee’s been reading Michael Taussig’s My Cocaine Museum (2004) while preparing the exhibition, which is about the lure of the forbidden and how we make sense of the world. Modeled on the Gold Museum in Colombia’s central bank, it is a parody aimed at the museum’s failure to acknowledge the enslaved Africans who mined the country’s wealth for almost four hundred years, engaging with the essence and inner life of heat, rain, stone, and swamp, as well as with the sublime fetishes of evil beauty. Li — who is Tate’s curator of international art — underlines that Lee’s work “invites disorientation,” which then “slowly dissipates into a sense of intimacy, empathy, belonging, and hope… without following a fixed script.” As the youngest artist to ever be awarded the Commission, not only does Lee’s daring work flip the script, it rearranges letters, rips up the page, and it’s not hard to imagine the artist then unashamedly feeding it to the dog bit by bit.