Mire Lee on the cannibalistic creativeness

Mire Lee’s monuments gush, gape, weep, and macerate. Drawing inspiration from physique horror, hentai, scatology, and vorarephilia, the South Korean sculptor fabricates hyperbolically visceral types that she mounts onto scaffolding or suspends from the ceiling and equips with clunky low-tech motors. Actors in a theater of abjection, her histrionic automatons discharge liquids by intestinal tubing or deploy churning blades to tear comfortable supplies to moist, grisly bits. Recently, Lee has been desirous about holes, which she characterizes as erotic websites of seepage and compression in addition to affective zones past the attain of language. Her drippy, orifice-riddled environment-cum-exhibition “Black Solar,” on view on the New Museum in New York from June 29 to September 17, takes up the psychoanalytic theories of Julia Kristeva, who wrote of a melancholic state whereby the Different is “higher fragmented, torn, minimize up, swallowed, digested . . . than misplaced.” Beneath, Lee considers a sculptural discipline predicated on not possible urges and ineffable voids.

I THOUGHT ABOUT calling my exhibition on the New Museum “Assholes,” however determined that was too direct. The present is an immersive set up with kinetic sculptures that ooze and tumble liquid clay, set towards partitions lined in clay-dipped cloth. Once I conceived of it, I used to be photos of various sorts of gaping holes on-line, and occupied with the methods by which a physique that stays open is radically permeable to the outer world: Inside comes out and outdoors is available in. The anus specifically is a type of erogenous gap that obliterates language; it’s each a topic that can’t communicate and one thing unspeakable. “Black Solar,” which I settled on as an exhibition title, references Julia Kristeva’s 1987 e book on melancholy and melancholy in relation to artmaking. Whenever you’re within the depths of melancholy, you don’t solely lose the need or want to speak, you additionally expertise what basically can’t be verbalized. So that you fall into holes and voids.

Holes first appeared in my artwork by chance: I used to be working with liquids, and the containers that I made to carry these liquids typically leaked. Controlling leakage was an obsession that finally turned a type of impossibility. I grew desirous about making intentionally leaky our bodies, leading to motorized sculptures by which fluids spurt and drip from tubes, such because the work I confirmed on the Venice Biennale final 12 months [Endless House: Holes and Drips, 2022] or alongside H. R. Giger’s sculpture on the Schinkel Pavillon in 2021 [Carriers – offspring, 2021; Endless House, 2021].

Rising up, I consumed loads of manga and drew my very own erotic variations to entertain myself. Once I was ten years previous, my father, who’s a surrealist sculptor, gave me a listing of Giger’s work, which had a big effect on me. I’ve discovered that there’s one thing inherently silly about sculpture as a medium: It necessitates a lot labor to provide, and when it inevitably fails, its rigidity signifies that it requires copious effort to change and repair. I’m continuously encountering my limits as I notice that my visions or ambitions exceed their container. I like to include motorized components as a result of they’ve a crude look and act past my management; after I use equipment to course of malleable supplies like clay or silicone, it distorts these media into unusual types that I couldn’t have anticipated. Folks typically tether my animatronic sculptures to conversations about expertise, however what’s occurring in my work is in reality pretty analog and runs counter to the slick aesthetic of latest applied sciences and new media. What intrigues me is the hole between human fantasies of expertise in an ideally rendered world, and actual life, which is one thing that you could contact and scent, stuffed with sagging topics which have been deformed by their passage by time.

Vorarephilia, or the erotic need to both devour or be consumed by the opposite, has profoundly impressed my sculptural observe. Formally, I like that vore pertains to interiors, holes, and channels, and that it foregrounds perversions of scale; with a view to swallow the opposite being, the swallowing topic have to be bigger. On an affective stage, I’m moved by the motive of the fetish: this not possible urge to unite so fully with the article of need that you’re inside them, or they’re inside you, which connects to Kristevian concepts of cannibalistic creativeness. I discover vore by consumption and regurgitation in standalone sculptures, nevertheless it’s additionally an environment that I attempt to construct round my installations so viewers would possibly really feel consumed by the work. How my sculptures are skilled finally comes right down to the place viewers are at in their very own lives, however I believe that these works are notably effectively suited to the numerous factors in life when issues cease making sense and collapse in on themselves.

— As advised to Cassie Packard