Mire Lee

    BIOGRAPHY

    Mire Lee (b. 1988, Seoul) currently lives and works in Amsterdam. She received both her BFA in Sculpture in 2012 and her MFA in Media Art in 2013 from the Seoul National University College.

    Mire Lee’s works, often eclectically made of industrial materials such as concrete, silicone, steel and clay, oscillate between horror and arousal and see violence as a central component of subjectivity. Low-tech kinetics and works of immobile dominance that are imbued with brutality and sexuality, force the viewer into a position of fetishistic obsession, voyeurism, and boundary violation. With her works, Lee negotiates questions of bodily porosity, acceptability and power, while creating a space that feels simultaneously industrialized and primordial.

    In 2018, Mire Lee participated in the residency program at Rijksakademie, Amsterdam. She has recently received the Special Prize of the Future Generation Art Prize 2021, as well as the Pontopreis MMK 2022. In 2024, Tate Modern and Hyundai Commission announced that Mirai Lee will present her work on October 8 at Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall.

    Selected solo & dual exhibitions: Mire Lee: Black Sun, The New Museum, New York, US (2023); As We Lay Dying, Kunstmuseum Den Haag, Hague, The Netherlands (2022); Look, I’ m a fountain of filth raving mad with love, Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt, Germany (2022); Carriers, Tina Kim Gallery, New York, US (2022); HR Giger & Mire Lee, Schinkel Pavillon, Berlin, Germany (2021); Carriers, Art Sonje Center, Seoul, South Korea (2020); among others.

    Selected group exhibitions: The rough grace of a bard, FLⒶT$, Brussels(2024); My Last Will, Casino Luxembourg-Forum d’art contemporain, Luxembourg(2024); Territory, Sprüth Magers, Berlin, Germany(2024); Dream Machines, DESTE Foundation, Centre for Contemporary Art, Athens, Greece (2023); Busan Biennale 2022: We, On the Rising Wave, Busan, South Korea (2022); 58th Carnegie International: Is it morning for you yet?, Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, US (2022); The 59th Venice Biennale: The Milk of Dreams, Giardini della Biennale and the Arsenale, Venice, Italy (2022); Future Generation Art Prize 2021, Pinchuk Art Centre, Kiev, Ukraine (2021); Techno, Museion, Museo d’arte Moderna E Contemporanea, Bolzano, Italy (2021); Contamination, Kunstverein Freiburg, Freiburg, Germany (2021); Breathing through Skin, Antenna Space, Shanghai, China (2020); (Im)Possible Bodies, Niet Normaal Foundation, Den Bosch, The Netherlands (2020); As time went on, a rumor started, Gianni Manhattan, Vienna, Austria (2020); Other. Worldly, Friesmuseum, Leeuwarden, The Netherlands (2020); The 15th Biennale de Lyon: Where Water Comes Together With Other Water, Lyon, France (2019); Surface Tension, Sharjah Art Foundation, Sharjah, UAE (2019); Lubricated Language, AKINCI, Amsterdam, The Netherlands (2019); The 12th Gwangju Biennale: Imagined Border, Gwangju, South Korea (2018); Double Negative, Arko Arts Center, Seoul, South Korea (2018); Moving/Image, Arko Art Center, Seoul, South Korea (2017); among others.

    Artworks

    EXHIBITIONS

    NEWS

    ARTICLES

    • Mire Lee: Mortal Machines | Louisa Elderton

      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.

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