“Within depression, if my existence is on the verge of collapsing, its lack of meaning is not tragic—it appears obvious to me, glaring and inescapable.
Where does this black sun come from? Out of what eerie galaxy do its invisible, lethargic rays reach me, pinning me down to the ground, to my bed, compelling me to silence, to renunciation?”
– Julia Kristeva, Black Sun (1987; trans. by Leon S. Roudiez, 1989)
Mire Lee frequently turns to industrial materials and machinery to mine for
waste and unexpected byproducts. In her installations and sculptures, there are low-fi motor-driven pumps, concrete mixers, PVC tubing, and hand-grafted silicon abscesses, which merge into experimental assemblages. Evoking a postindustrial dissolution between machines and organisms, her kinetic installations rely on circulatory systems that mimic the homeostatic process of organs. In an algorithmic world, where questions of pleasure and consumption habits are increasingly quantifiable and aligned into predictive patterns of regulated behavior, there is something primordial in the involuntary movements and behavior of Lee’s deconstructed automatons.
Following the opening of Lee’s exhibition “Black Sun” at the New Museum in New York in June, Billy Tang, director of Hong Kong’s nonprofit Para Site, spoke with Lee about her exhibition, the material inspirations she has taken in recent years— from clay to fabrics—and the social and cultural practices from which she draws her influence.
BILLY TANG: Your new installation in New York features a series of kinetic sculpture and fabric works, the inspiration for which comes from Julia Kristeva’s 1987 study of depression and melancholia, Black Sun (1987). How did you come across this book and what about it inspired you to make this new body of work?
MIRE LEE: In Black Sun, Kristeva talks about melancholia and depression as something that is basically unspeakable. “Black sun” is what it says—the feeling of depression, if you can imagine the feelings of a black sun. When you’re inside a period of depression you don’t want to talk about it, or you just don’t feel the need to talk about it. There is no act of speaking because it’s meaningless anyway.
I somehow also connected it to a song, The Crying Light (2009), by Anohni [formerly Antony] and the Johnsons, where the person goes to the back of the sun to carve the face of someone they love. That’s an image of devotion, because as soon as you go there you will melt away. I think the image of a “black sun” has this lesson: an incredible power that cancels everything else—every other system or order that exists because it’s so powerful. This is exactly the feeling of depression I experienced for myself—that there is nothing else, you just lose your sense of everything that is not that thing itself.
BT: You have mentioned deep-diving online images of orifices as another inspiration for “Black Sun.” You’ve always been interested in the macabre. Orifices, excretions of all kinds: it’s a complex field of impulses, associations, and desires that exist outside of what is expressible. Can you talk about how the idea of orifices inspired this work and others, such as Endless House: Holes and Drips (2022)?
ML: I chose “Black Sun” as the title and as the main imagery. In my head was the visual association of an asshole and a black circle.I was interested in this image of a gaping hole, like right after anal sex. It’s also like an image of an eclipse.
There was an image from an online hentai—which is what I read quite often—that I was so impressed by that I used it in a lot of my old works as well. It shows an asshole right after ejaculation with cum flowing out. It’s depicted in a very geometric way and accompanied with the words “I wanna be together” in the middle of the void, expressing a feeling of melancholia from two characters about not being able to have a baby together.
As you said, I’ve been using holes a lot in my work: bodies and entities with a lot of holes that are open everywhere. They become subjects that are not able to control what is coming in and out.It’s related to the psychotic or vulnerable subject that has a weak sense of self, or that is not solid or closed. Then, at some point, for example, with Endless House at the Venice Biennale, I wanted to flip it over, from this extreme vulnerability to a position of “empowerment” with the forms draped over a large scaffold.
BT: I noticed that the use of fabric in “Black Sun” is like a fragile membrane around the installation. I’m not sure if I’ve seen that in other works of yours.
ML: The interior walls of the New Museum show came after the Busan Biennale 2022 project, Landscape with Many Holes: Skins of Yeongdo Sea (2022), where I used construction-fencing mesh.We were already chipping it for this project so that the edge has this shabby feel. In “Black Sun,” I wanted to have a melancholic atmosphere so the fabric looks very exhausted and torn away. In my bigger installations I always take something from my previous work. I’ve used fabrics before in a very fragmented way. I made curtains with sanitary paper but they immediately tore—I loved using toilet paper or tissue paper dipped in silicon or oil, but they were very wet and fragile.
Being inside Black Sun could be like the sensation of being inside an animal or the interior of a living thing. I tried to do this here and also in the show at MMK Frankfurt’s Zollamt space, “Look, I’m a fountain of filth raving mad with love,” with a skeleton structure of rebar—maybe something like the inside of a whale.This time I knew I wanted to make a steamed room where it’s wet inside; the fabric is dipped in clay and stays moist over the period of the exhibition.
BT: Your recent work riffs on different ways to expand an understanding of the culture around “vore,” or vorarephilia, a fetish of being swallowed or swallowing another entity alive. A crucial feature of this fetish is the insatiable impossibility of realizing this desire. I imagine your interest in vore as a way to take art into a new arena of imaginary extremes, to break the norms of what is expected, which you use as a subject to engage with topics such as intimacy, consumption, degradation, violence, and the female body. The relationship seems blurred, in terms of the distinction between what might be your obsessive interests and those belonging to the subcultures you follow. How would you describe this relationship?
ML: Vore was more of a great source of inspiration rather than a topic of research, with many different connections. I don’t think I could make works that inform about vore, because those will be bad works. But in terms of my more habitual consumption, which is more subcultural, vore works better for me because I get the subcultural methodologies and expressions. I think subcultures can do these kinds of things that high culture cannot do.
When I used Veronica Moser’s video—she was a scatology [coprophilia] porn actor who is now deceased—in my exhibition at MMK in Frankfurt, I built the whole imagery of this show around it. There’s Moser’s video and then I have piles of concrete, and then I wrote letters with my finger in concrete: I was thinking about a creative person who writes with their own shit, or makes piles of shit. In all these instances, there is also a lot of imagery of excrement. But, it doesn’t mean that I ever engaged in scatology or anything like that, or that I would get off on it. So in this way, there is always an appropriation.
When I saw Frederick Kiesler’s Endless House (1950–60) and then Louise Bourgeois’s work, the impact was very immediate for me. Then vore led me to holes, sick or diseased bodies, and the concept of vulnerability.
BT: You also draw from another influence, the Korean poet Kim Eon Hee. Does that relate to this interest in the abject, for example, as a kind of resistance, a facade of appearances, especially in terms of societal pressure?
ML: She’s been a huge inspiration, especially on this point, because I really love how her poetry in this way doesn’t submit to its form. I know that’s impossible, because it’s already contained in the form, but there’s always this feeling of it wanting to do more than that. It destroys the form or the container itself, which is what I love most about Eon Hee’s work. Ever since I learned about it, I think there’s always been something inside me that tries to copy or follow it as an attitude. That’s cool.
I think what I’m doing is just a bit closer to trolling than resisting, but of course, there’s always a drive to break things a little. Or, I want to do things in a way that is not “nice.”
BT: There is a wide range of references from architecture, horror, pornography, and cybernetics in your work. You often use the word “stupid” in an open way to describe the machines or way of using materials in your work. I get the sense it is an attitude, an “irreverence” to a certain conversation of what constitutes art in terms of appearance, on one level. Maybe this idea of “stupidity” connects to your interest in voids—spaces in which it is impossible to be completely rationalized by language or technology. Could you unpack this term a little?
ML: This word “irreverence” is very nice. “Stupid” is the most basic word of degradation, but it’s also a sign of affection. When you say “oh, this or that is stupid,” or when you fight with someone, I think that makes them closer to yourself. And it’s more forgivable. So stupidity, for me, has always been a positive quality. In terms of machinery, I think modern or contemporary technologies and machines are more fundamentally stupid than old-school industrial ones. Of course with old machines, automatically there is this quality of them looking stupid because they’re so bulky or they look like the functions they’re meant to perform.
In terms of sentiment, I like the failure of futurism and other hopes that were so humongous—that’s very human, to fail in a dramatic way. I think there is something interesting there. I’m very nostalgic and naive when I talk about this, but I feel as if there’s something that you can sentimentally rely on in old machines, whereas our current technologies are more sinister and hidden. Underneath the slick surfaces you can’t see what they are doing. That scares me. So when it comes to “stupidity,” it is much more positive than it sounds. As for “irreverence,” there is always something inside me that wants to make the work look imperfect, not slick or not cool.
BT: I’m fascinated with how you shift between the spontaneous and a high level of planning—because of kinetic elements but also the scale can be large. Mechanical or hard static elements are often next to things that squirt, drip, or amass with viscous liquids, such as oil or grease. There is a DIY quality to how you make things, too. They’re like an elevated homage to B movies, for example, or alien gore, or horror. It’s very different from other ideals that are associated with traditional ideas of kinetic art. How do you improvise around these ideas?
ML: Like you said, I have a device that has to function or that has to hold a certain weight or has to do this-or-that. It’s a very good starting point, especially for an installation work. There’s obviously a lot of personification around the structures: a pump might resemble animal guts, or the scaffolds become skeletons, or the construction mesh becomes a skin, or the slip or clay becomes like flesh. There are a lot of very infantile associations. Using industrial materials, especially those that have a function and can be useful, becomes an association point for me—not only to humanize, or to compare it to an organic being, but also sometimes with the concepts.
For example, I have used a lot of the old plywood panels that cast concrete in inner walls of buildings. They carry the trace of the concrete and then it gets worn down. It shows actual traces of what laborers did. It’s like a skin. I used it as the inner wall of the “Carriers” exhibition, for example, at Art Sonje Center. Industrial materials are normally easy to get and the secondhand ones have signs of their usage. These are somehow very accessible for me as a sculptor to play with.
BT: You have this amazing ability to experiment on so many different scales. Whether it’s a huge industrial space where the sculpture takes up a monumental size or with more human- scaled “automatons” such as the “Carriers” series that lay on the ground or are suspended from the ceiling. At times you’ve also used architectural structures such as scaffolding and construction beams to provide a skeleton or a kind of armature that determines its final shape. There’s an array of effects that are used to create a theatrical and visceral interaction with the audience to transform the psychological connection to a space.
ML: If I’m making a little sculpture in my studio I know what’s going on and I can help manipulate certain details so that it looks good—or it looks ugly but still good. Whereas when I work on a huge project there are so many things that you just simply cannot have your hands on. So you have to choose, because it involves a lot of people that are better than I am at doing this and that, or it’s a different side, or there’s the weather, or there is this and that, or there’s a building and the building doesn’t want to do this, and so on, you know. All these limitations actually give me interesting directions.
Architecture means a lot of different things to me. I’ve always thought about how horrific it must be if you make a building and it stays there for a very long time. I don’t just mean for the architect, but for the people involved in it. What was the intention of this project and did it accomplish that, or did it become something else?
Because I make sculptures, they are also just around. You can’t slip them behind your desk like a canvas. They’re there, and then you have to go through the humiliation of keeping them or destroying them. Sometimes you make a sizable sculpture that’s so “there” and takes up space—that is very embarrassing, too. It’s very luxurious in an art context because I get to work on a large scale but you know it’s not forever, so you’re fictionally engaged with it but not without real responsibility. Doing art on a big scale is funny; I get to experience the things that are attached to it, but not really.
Construction-site material I’ve just always loved. It’s somehow a little bit intimidating. In “Look, I’m a fountain of filth raving mad with love,” I feel like I was stealing the sentiment of the construction site, where it carries so much hope or greed or has the potential of becoming something, but then it’s also very exposed, vulnerable. You see the naked rebar structure, and then the concrete is being poured in. There are a lot of heavy machines, and of course you see a lot of workers.
BT: So what does your studio look like these days? Are there any techniques or ideas you are currently experimenting with?
ML: Right now it’s empty, but not clean. It’s like someone hurriedly left. It’s really funny when you put a project up and then you come back to the studio and you find the “unchosen” bits and pieces.
I’m working on a new project, so there’s a lot of imagination happening. Normally the way I work is that I have to do something to find out how stupid my first plan was. So when I start, it’s totally abstract. Then I do something and find it was too vague. At the moment I’m thinking about an all-in-one system, with liquid and motors, where something gets produced within it and then it comes out in the middle—a production machine, like a womb that constantly gives birth, and where they’re constantly exposed. And there should a little element of desire, but I don’t know how yet.
