Mire Lee: Black Sun: New Museum
Mire Lee: Black Sun
June 29 – September 17, 2023
New Museum Fourth Floor
The New Museum will present the first American solo museum exhibition of the work of Mire Lee (b. 1988, Seoul, South Korea; lives and works between Seoul and Amsterdam, Netherlands). Installed in the New Museum’s Fourth Floor gallery, the exhibition will debut a new site-specific installation featuring an architectural environment and kinetic sculpture. Composed of materials including low-tech motors, pumping systems, steel rods, and PVC hoses filled with grease, glycerin, silicone, slip, and oil, Lee’s animatronic sculptures operate both like living organisms and biological machines. Drawing references from architecture, horror, pornography, and cybernetics, and evoking bodily functions and environmental decay, Lee offers a visceral means to describe properties that exist between the realms of the technological and the corporeal: tenderness, desire, abjection, anxiety, and revulsion, among other states. In the past year, Lee has had institutional solo exhibitions at MMK Frankfurt and Kunstmuseum Den Haag, Netherlands, and has participated in major international exhibitions including the 59th International Art Exhibition of the Venice Biennale, the 58th Carnegie International, and Busan Biennial 2022.
This exhibition is curated by Gary Carrion-Murayari, Kraus Family Senior Curator, and Madeline Weisburg, Curatorial Assistant. The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue published by the New Museum, including a conversation between the artist and Gary Carrion-Murayari as well as texts by Wong Binghao, Florentina Holzinger, and Madeline Weisburg.
-
Meet 8 Artists Who Broke Big in 2023—From Sculptor Mire Lee to Abstract Painter Rachel Jones
ArtnetAbstract painting has continued to dominate in 2023, with a host of emerging names making a sizable dent in the market with energetic works inspired...Learn More -
Mire Lee in New York Dystopie der Selbstauflösung
MonopolDie Künstlerin Mire Lee ist eine Meisterin des Unbehaglichen. In ihrer beklemmenden Installation im New Museum in New York huldigt sie der schwarzen Sonne ...Learn More
-
Mire Lee “Black Sun” New Museum / New York
Flash ArtMy lone star is dead — and my bespangled lute / Bears the black sun of Melancholia. — Gérard de Nerval, El Desdichado (The Disinherited)...Learn More -
The Sorrow and Desire of Abysmal Life Machines: An Interview With Mire Lee
ArtAsiaPacific“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....Learn More
-
Mire Lee
SculptureStepping off the elevator to see “Black Sun,” an exhibition of new work by Mire Lee (on view through September 17, 2023), I found myself...Learn More -
See South Korean Rising Star Mire Lee’s Gutsy Debut of Squelching Kinetic Sculptures at the New Museum
ArtnetThe South Korean artist Mire Lee has been made a name for herself in recent years due to her penchant for making audiences squirm. At...Learn More
-
Ick Art: Why a Rising Generation of Female Sculptors Is Embracing Body Horror
CulturedImagine a meat locker or a mad scientist’s lair: that’s what the New Museum’s fourth floor looks like today. Plastic-lined scaffolding forms a dank, fetid...Learn More -
We Who Are Drawn To the Repulsive
ACK (artcritickorea) Learn More
-
Mire Lee on the cannibalistic imagination
ArtforumMire Lee’s monuments gush, gape, weep, and macerate. Drawing inspiration from body horror, hentai, scatology, and vorarephilia, the South Korean sculptor fabricates hyperbolically visceral forms...Learn More -
For Mire Lee, Rising Art Star, It All Comes Down to Guts
The New York TimesThe Korean artist’s ingenious machine sculptures, coming to the New Museum, show things that “you don’t actually want to see,” a leading curator says. One...Learn More