Black Sun by Mire Lee
As part of an ongoing initiative to promote new productions by emerging artists, and launched in collaboration with Kvadrat, the New Museum presented Mire Lee’s first solo exhibition in the United States.
The site-specific installation takes over the museum’s fourth floor and transforms it into an architectural environment dominated by animatronic sculptures that operate both like living organisms and biological machines. To create the sculptures, Lee drew inspiration from several unrelated fields, such as architecture, horror, pornography, and cybernetics. The artist selected Sahco’s Cocoon and Kvadrat Febrik’s Apparel, cutting and dipping the textiles in liquid clay to recreate the shapes of organs, bringing corporeal and body function into the realm of technology through low-tech motors, pumping systems, steel rods and more. Walking through the installation, visitors will have the feeling of traversing the visceral system of an organism as they traverse diverse emotional states such as desire, revulsion, anxiety, and tenderness.
The title of the exhibition “Black Sun” derives from Julia Kristeva’s 1987 book on melancholia. Similar to how the Bulgarian-French feminist and semiotician depicted the impossibility of communication when individuals face depression, Mire Lee’s sculptures exist as impenetrable entities, conveying a sense of environmental decay, emotional voids and psychological tensions.
New Museum
4th Floor, 235 Bowery, NY 10002, New York
June 29 – September 17, 2023
Monday, closed
Tuesday – Wednesday, 11 am – 6 pm
Thursday, 11 am – 9 pm
Friday – Sunday, 11 am – 6 pm