Mire Lee: Black Sun
The textile manufacturer Kvadrat supports the first institutional solo exhibition in the United States by Mire Lee (b. 1988, Seoul, South Korea) at the New Museum
July 20, 2023
Installed in the New Museum’s Fourth Floor gallery, Mire Lee’s exhibition comprises a site-specific installation of new animatronic sculptures fusing the technological with the corporeal. This exhibition is part of an ongoing initiative, launched in collaboration with Kvadrat, to premiere ambitious new productions by emerging artists. To create the sculptures, Lee cut and dipped textiles in liquid clay using Sahco’s Cocoon and Kvadrat Febrik’s Apparel by Byborre.
"Our ongoing partnership with New Museum has enabled Kvadrat to have inspirational dialogue with artists– talents that push the boundaries and allow us to see new potential in our textiles and processes. In collaboration with our curatorial advisers Julia Rodrigues and Francesca Astesani from South into North, we are happy to present our latest collaboration and once again support the production of a new commission by an emerging artist who has not yet had major institutional exhibitions in the US."
Njusja de Gier, Senior Vice President Marketing & Digital Kvadrat
Black Sun is titled after the Bulgarian-French feminist and semiotician Julia Kristeva’s 1987 book of the same name, which is a study of depression and melancholia. Lee’s installation debuts a new body of kinetic sculptures housed in an architectural environment specially designed for the New Museum.
Composed of materials including low-tech motors, pumping systems, steel rods, and PVC hoses filled with grease, glycerin, silicone, clay 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 an intuitive means to describe properties that exist between the realms of the technological and the corporeal: tenderness, desire, abjection, anxiety, and revulsion, among other states.
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, Kim Eon Hee, and Madeline Weisburg.
NOTES FOR THE EDITORS
Mire Lee: Black Sun
June 29 – September 17 2023
New Museum Fourth Floor
235 Bowery
NY 10002, New York
About Mire Lee
Mire Lee (she/her) lives and works in Amsterdam. Lee has a BFA in Sculpture and an MFA in Media Art from the College of Fine Arts, Seoul National University, and was a 2018 resident at Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam. Lee has had solo exhibitions at ZollamtMMK, Frankfurt (2022); Kunstmuseum Den Haag, The Hague, Netherlands (2022); Tina Kim Gallery, New York (2022); Art Sonje Center, Seoul (2020); Casco Art Institute, Utrecht, Netherlands (2019); and Insa Art Space, Seoul (2014); and a two-person show with H.R. Giger at Schinkel Pavillon, Berlin (2021). Her work was included in the 59th Venice Biennale (2022); 58th Carnegie International, Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh (2022); Busan Biennial (2022); 15th Lyon Biennial (2019); and the Gwangju Biennial Pavilion Project (2018).
About New Museum
The New Museum is the only museum in New York City exclusively devoted to contemporary art. Founded in 1977, the New Museum is a center for exhibitions, information, and documentation about living artists from around the world. From its beginnings as a one-room office on Hudson Street to the inauguration of its first freestanding building on the Bowery designed by SANAA in 2007, the New Museum continues to be a place of experimentation and a hub of new art and new ideas.