Mire Lee

Tina Kim Gallery is pleased to present Carriers, a solo exhibition by Mire Lee.

Carriers marks the New York premiere of her eponymous body of work shown at Art Sonje, Korea in 2020, and the Schinkel Pavillon in 2021. The show's title expands upon Lee's ongoing conceptual theme of "carriers," which reenact circulatory systems that sustain life. This methodology extends to reference Mire's own mother as the artist's life-giving organism, as well as the sculpture's circulatory pump system (commonly used in dialysis treatments and industrial manufacturing) as a metabolic generator—feeding pigmented glycerine through hoses encircling the installation.

A telling reference for Lee is vore, a fetish involving the impossible urge to swallow the object of one’s desire in a total annihilation of boundary between self and other. Rather than offer a clear aggressor or desiring party, Carriers, both the work and as an exhibition, instead turns to uncompromising partiality, reminiscent of the familiar or bodily in its spurting cavities without committing to a single, identifiable form.

The exhibition coincides with Lee’s presentations in the Venice Biennale, the Busan Biennale, and the 58th Carnegie International, and follows two solo shows at the MMK Frankfurt and the Kunstmuseum Den Haag in 2022.