The South Korean artist Mire Lee, who is based in Seoul and Amsterdam, makes sculptures that whirr and splutter, seemingly teetering on the edge of collapse. She uses industrial materials such as oil, concrete and clay—the results feeling both otherworldly and deeply tied to the human body. Indeed, it is the body that Lee references most explicitly in Open Wound, her commission for Tate Modern’s cavernous Turbine Hall. Fabric sculptures, called “skins”, appear en masse: first, they are drenched in a thick, dripping liquid in the centre of the room, then moved to dry in a back area, and finally hung, bit by bit, over the course of the show, throughout the main hall. It is an immersive, performative, piece that the curator Alvin Li says suggests the theatricality of Lee’s work may be growing in subtle and enduring ways.
The Art Newspaper: This is in many ways your most ambitious project to date. How does it feel now you have finished?
Mire Lee: I feel like I’m seeing the show for the first time now, now that I see how it came out. When I was installing, I felt like I was inside of it. I was very immersed.
How did you approach the process and how has that differed from previous works?
The process for all of my projects is organic. There’s no real, thought-through structure. The only thing that is very different here is I normally work really hands-on with everything, every process. For this it was just physically impossible. There are so many corners that I could not get my own hands on—and because of safety, liability and so on, there are many parts that I couldn’t do myself. But in the end, I think I’ve managed to do it very DIY, with these amazing fabricators. It’s the first time I’ve worked with fabricators in this way.
You have created a liquid that is reminiscent of sauces and other things that feel halfway between solidity and liquidity. What interests you about achieving that exact kind of texture?
Firstly, it was a technical necessity—we needed something that dries relatively quickly. It was a new recipe. I also love the materiality of it.
One thing that immediately strikes me when I see your work, including Open Wound, is there is a vulnerability—it feels like everything could fall apart at any moment—but at the same time there’s some very complex engineering going on. How do you balance those two things?
I don’t really balance it. It shouldn’t fall apart but I like some things falling apart. Sometimes I get it wrong, sometimes I get it right, and that’s something I’ve learned to enjoy. It doesn’t make me happy— because at first I want things to go well—but I’ve started playing a lot with the potential technical failures of every project.
Was the technical training something you have learnt on the job?
I don’t see myself as someone who has curiosity in technology. It’s more like an impulse or obsession of wanting to do something wild or new. I took a very technical course, traditional sculpture, which I also really enjoyed. I really love sculpture as a medium, because it’s very tough, like stupid tough, and it’s very close to your body. And I really like the labour in it. But I guess I got into kinetics because it allowed me to make things that I didn’t have full control over.
How did you find working with the vastness of the Turbine Hall?
I think I’m pretty good with scale. Normally, I have a feeling that the work is how it’s going to feel when it’s placed in a certain volume and height. With this space, I wasn’t so confident. It was a bit harder.
What is it about factory spaces that you find interesting?
The collectiveness of human labour, the anonymity of workers, human dreams.
There is something very resonant about a leaking, whirring mess in the middle of one of the UK’s biggest tourist attractions, at the precarious moment we are in. How much are you thinking about the global context when you are making a work like this?
I try really hard to stay away from didactic approaches. So there is no conscious puzzling or contextualising happening when I conceive of my work. But there’s me who is a part of a collective going through the same time as other people. And that person is being, of course, hugely affected by it. I almost feel like the responsibility is more for myself to feel everything sharply and openly. I think that makes the work resonate.
You have previously talked about the “unspeakable”: this idea that your machines are representative to an extent of something that cannot be said. Do you think that’s important here, to offer a moment of quiet contemplation in a public space?
Yes, I think there is something that intensifies or deepens when you cut the channel of language. Like when you want to feel something really deep, you close your eyes. So yeah, I particularly like that quality of a machine or the kinetic medium.
Open Wound stands out from your previous works in that it involves human actors—technicians who will take the soaked “skins” down and move them across the hall to the drying area while visitors are present. The result is something that feels close to a performance, or that certainly has a sense of the theatrical. Is this a direction you are consciously taking with your practice? Should we expect to see more of it in your work?
My work has always involved a huge amount of labour and maintenance, except that this was always kept in the background. For this project, based on discussion with the curator Alvin, we decided to bring it to the front of stage, to highlight, as you said, this theatrical dimension. But I should flag that all the maintenance work actually serves a function and is not exaggerated, purposeless performance. It’s about highlighting the processual, durational aspect of my work.
The work will change over time, with more of the skins appearing. What effect do you hope to achieve with the work’s durational aspect?
I want the pieces to fill the space, but also disappear into it. For me, [the skins] makes me look at every corner of the building, and at the crane [in the hall], and so on. I want that feeling to be subtle. I think subtle feelings are more bodily sometimes.
—Alexander Morrison
