Mire Lee: Open Wound - Tate Modern unveils 9th annual Hyundai Commission Installation.

Unveiled yesterday at the Tate Modern’s legendary Turbine Hall, Hyundai Commission: Mire Lee is now open for viewing. The exhibition is the ninth of its like and forms part of a long-standing partnership between Hyundai Motor Group and the Tate Modern. Since the Commission’s inception in 2000, Turbine Hall has been host to a breathtaking selection of the world’s best contemporary artists - South-Korean Mire Lee, only the latest.

Hyundai Commission: Mire Lee: Open Wound, Installation View. Photo © Tate (Oliver Cowling with Lucy Green)

Mire Lee is renowned for her exploration of the liminal, utilising methods that are successful at evoking a kineticism in the inanimate that is eerily reminiscent of animation. Consistently disregarding that which is aesthetically appealing in favour of her own mangled suggestions of biology, Lee produces art that employs elements of the present world in a manner that is intoxicatingly intimate, and yet always so intimidatingly alien. It’s paradoxical - she utilises the medium of decay and decline as a tool to scoff at humanity’s singular barrel towards automation, despite the known precarity of the natural world. The underlying notes of rebellion that punctuate each of her pieces drive the point home, usually highlighting the taut fragility of the tension between the ideas she juxtaposes.

‘Open Wound’ reimagines the four walls of the legendary Turbine Hall as a living, breathing - and decaying - construction site. Its crowning jewel a 7-metre-long turbine - a beautiful nod to the hall’s noted past as Bankside Power Station, whilst also evoking a type of haunting atmosphere that may only arise when reawakening ghosts of the past. The installation is constructed in real time, alchemising the kineticism of its visceral nature in order to legitimise the characterisation of the factory as alive. Lee’s creation assumes a humanity in its abjectness; the industrial production of skin-like fabric sculptures paired with viscous liquid and silicon vein-like tubes evoking a gore, whose anatomical familiarity fails to soothe the associated feeling of repulsion. 

Mire Lee’s reinterpretation of the Turbine Hall is an ode to the symbiotic relationship between regeneration and decay, and the processes of its creation speaks to the exploitative impact of industrialisation, humanising and abstracting the art concomitantly.