In conversation for Elephant, Nora Hagdahl uncovers how Mire Lee captures what it means to be both human and machine.

Mire Lee joins our call from her temporary studio in Berlin, where she’s currently staying – the other half of her life she spends in Amsterdam. Originally, she’s from Korea. The in-betweenness aligns with the work: Lee’s sculptures feel half-machine and half-organism, leaking, dripping, and twitching through their own mechanical rhythms.

In 2024, she exhibited her largest installation to date, Open Wound, in Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall. The presentation was relentless in scale, turning the space back into the living factory it once was. A seven-meter turbine hung from the building’s original crane, pumping dark pink liquid through strings of silicone tubing; chains hoisted textile-like structures – she calls them “skins,”– toward the rafters, while the floor read as a site of processing and drying, somewhere between laundry and abattoir. Throughout the exhibition, workers moved the skins around the space. The ongoing movement gave the work a temporal rhythm, where repetition, labor, maintenance, care, breathing, metabolism and being, perpetually on the verge of collapse, were foregrounded over any finished form.

Lee has been building this vocabulary for a decade, routing viscous matter through lo-fi motors and peristaltic pumps so that sculpture behaves like fevered endocrine systems. Part of the pleasure in Lee’s practice is her embrace of abjection. The materials are industrial – rebar, scaffolding, mixers, pumps, PVC hoses – yet their behavior is mortally soft, often evoking the image of a body in decay. For over an hour, we talk about The Matrix, Kraftwerk’s laser grids warping over middle-aged bellies, and pornography as a collective dream that tells on us. We return, again and again, to what she calls the archaic melancholia of “lumpy, blobby” forms: bodies that refuse to be smoothed into the eternal or the ideal.

Nora: You exhibited in Stockholm not too long ago, right? In a group exhibition, at Bonniers Konsthall. You showed this installation with the concrete blenders. I’m ashamed to say I didn’t go and see it, so I don’t know why I’m mentioning it.

Mire: I didn’t install them myself, so I also didn’t get to see it actually.

Nora: I feel a bit like a mess today. I just came home from New York, so I’m a bit jet-lagged. I was there to see the Addison Rae concert. Do you know her music? I’m a big fan.

Mire: What is her name, sorry?

Nora: Addison Rae. She’s huge right now, haha.

Mire: I’m really shit with pop culture. It’s embarrassing actually.

Nora: I noticed you don’t have Instagram. Maybe that has something to do with it.

Mire: It’s amazing how isolated it makes me.

Nora: I was curious about that decision because, as a visual artist today, Instagram seems like important platform to promote your work. How come you aren’t on there?

Mire: I basically have a very addictive personality.

Nora: I get that. I actually pay another app one hundred euros a year just to keep me off Instagram, in an attempt to control my screen time.

Mire: I think I’m too fragile for the constant feed of things.

Nora: But the more I thought about it – about the fact that you don’t have Instagram as an artist in 2025 – the more it seemed connected to your practice. Your work kind of rejects this instant legibility that social media demands. A lot of art today is created as quick images for the feed, but your work insists on duration, on opacity, and being encountered rather than consumed.

Mire: In a way, I think being offline has contributed to this anachronistic quality to my work. Not being on social media made everything feel a bit out of time… But it depends, earlier on in my career a lot of people connected my work to the post-human discourse, and maybe not post-Internet art, but digital imagery, and digital life. Not so much anymore though, I think that way of framing my work is fading away. But yeah, as funny as it sounds – not having social media is definitely shaping my work. I still fully don’t know what, not yet.

Nora: I wanted to ask how you think about your practice in relation to digital spaces — how your sculptures operate once they’re translated into images and what happens when they’re detached from the physical world. Every art work today inevitably turn into images circulating online. It feels like the art world now straddles two realities: the tangible one and the digital one, where so much of how we experience of art take place. How do you think about your own work within that divide?

Mire: I feel very strongly about the whole idea of the digital cortex. It would be impossible not to, because our entire way of living and navigating the world has changed so dramatically over the past two decades, essentially in the time it took our generation to grow up. This intensely digitalized life makes me feel even more attached to human desperation. The filters we use on our photos, the rendered images, the endless things that can happen in the digital realm — it’s all so infinite and fast. And that makes the contrast with our own mortality feel even sharper: how briefly our physical bodies stay beautiful, or intact, or perfect.

Nora: Definitely. We all have this kind of cybernetic experience of life, juggling our online worlds with our offline bodies. What I find interesting about your sculptures is that, even though they touch on that idea of the cybernetic – merging machine and body – they’re not digital in the least. They feel industrial, mechanical, almost nostalgic for the material age we’re moving away from. I wanted to ask how you think about that relationship: between the technical and the mechanical, and how the body figures into that dialogue in your work?

Mire: I’ve always had a lot of affection for old-school machines and robust, tangible physical objects. You can feel their presence; they do something. And you can guess their function just by looking at them. We’re more and more stepping into “epoch Apple,” with all these sleek designed machines that reveal nothing about themselves. These new machines confuse me. We know they do something, but it’s impossible to guess what.

There’s a kind of nostalgia for the industrial era in my work. Even though that period was also a time of huge technological leaps, it was still a world we could relate to physically – through the worker’s body, the laborer’s body. The machines and the people resembled each other in a way.

I’m not sure if we’ve really left that behind, or if we ever can. The digital world feels so anonymous and neutral, and I think we’ll always fall back into something more bodily, simply because we are bodies. But maybe that’s just a reflection of my own feelings.

Nora: When I look at your work, I feel that same nostalgia you’re describing. There’s a sense of looking back, but at the same time, it also feels strangely futuristic, almost like a *Mad Max *kind of future, a world that’s distant, oily, rusted, and half-collapsed.

And yet, as you say, it also points to something ongoing, we still produce things, the engines are still going, even if it’s not so much in this part of the world anymore. It’s not like we’ve disappeared into the virtual completely, or at least not yet. Maybe one day we’ll live entirely through avatars in headsets, but your work keeps pointing to what must lie behind the interface, underneath that polished surface. It points to the place where body and the machine are intertwined, like in the Matrix. It’s hard not to think about that scene when Neo is flushed out of the pod with all those wires and metal rods snapping free from his body. I’m curious about whether you see your work as historical or futuristic?

Mire: I don’t know. It’s not for me to say. But what you’re saying reminds me of a concert I saw with Kraftwerk when they were performing a few years ago in Korea. They were doing their signature thing with the grid of lasers projected across their bodies. But now they’re all old have bellies, so the grid was warping over them, bending with their stomachs. I found it such a sweet image.

Nora: Maybe that’s a good way to describe what your work is about: that friction where technology touches the softness of an body in decay.

Mire: I love the human desire and desperation of wanting the impossible. I’m very touched by this thing that we’re capable of perceiving and then conceiving the ideal, but that we could never actually reach it.

Nora: At least not in the real world. There’s something about the digital realm, filtered images, or even the sleek Apple machines, that feels obsessed with perfection. It performs this fantasy of eternity, of never decaying, breaking down or dying. Your work feels like the opposite of that. It’s so much about decay, about time moving forward in time – about what happens as things age, shift, and transform. Could you tell me a bit about how decay plays into your practice?

Mire: It started with me wanting to make kinetic works, even though I had no background in mechanics or engineering. So, naturally, everything kept breaking or failing and decay slowly became part of the work itself. When I began using liquids, the changes became even more unpredictable and sometimes the pieces transformed far more than I intended. Over time, I realized that trying to control that process was impossible, and eventually I stopped wanting to. I started to enjoy how the materials behaved on their own, and how the artworks became larger than my own conception.

Nora: Working like that seems to be a lot about letting go. It also makes me think about the role of the artist – about control and the act of losing it. And I feel like your practice expands on that. Your sculptures almost behave like bodies, they drip, they vomit and they’re alive in their own way.

Mire: I really love to think about people vomiting. It’s not like a fetish or anything, but when I vomit myself, or when friends puke when they’re too drunk or something, I find it so endearing because there’s a sense of being left to one’s own body. And there’s something very erotic about watching someone being so vulnerable.

Nora: [Laughing] That’s also about losing control, right? Visible body fluids generally have this connotation to losing control of the body, like the inside is pouring out. How do you reflect on this idea of control? I almost think of it as a kind of master-slave dynamic in your work ­– where at first, you’re the master, but over time the work takes over and becomes the one in control.

Mire: I like that. Sometimes I feel that what happens in the studio – and even in showing the work – mirrors broader power dynamics, especially our human need to serve something, to feel a sense of purpose. The labor in my work becomes a way of anchoring myself in that search. It’s existential, really. The act of working gives me a sense of direction, of mental stability, a feeling that I’m moving toward something.

Nora: Your sculptures often feel alive, like they breathe or have their own pulse and presence. For me as the viewer, it makes it possible to connects more to the work itself, as if it’s its own being. Do you see them that way?

Mire: I personify them a lot in my own studio, as soon as there’s a lump. Humans are all the same when they’re sleeping, sick, or dying. Maybe that’s why I’m drawn to those lumpy, blobby, ragged forms – they carry a kind of archaic melancholia. I’m also imagining the humankind as one entity where everybody is very close to each other. It sounds very idyllic when I say it like that, but it’s a grotesque world.

Nora: Maybe exactly like those Matrix rooms where everyone is connected, bodies merging into one network. Your work has something of that too — the body intertwined with the machine, absorbed into a larger system. Sometimes your work feels like something that’s been set in motion and can’t stop, that it keeps going even when it hurts to continue. There’s tenderness in that endurance, but also pain, as if the system itself is pleading to be shut down. How do you think about that balance between care and suffering in your work?

Mire: I like these states that is not intellectualized or articulated, where there’s still ambivalence. I think that’s truer to reality. But it was also due to technical reasons, especially in works.

Nora: We’ve talked about the control and master-slave dynamic in relation to you and your sculptures. There’s also an erotic aspect to that. And then there’s this slaughterhouse undertone going on in you work: the steel, the industrial materials, the dripping silicone, like blood. It evokes not only to violence but also to BDSM, fetich, blurring pain and desire. And I know you’ve referenced Veronica Moser in your work as well. Tell me about her.

Mire: Yes, she was a porn star — she passed away, I think, about four years ago. She was a pioneer in scatology, which involves eating or feeding shit. She was one of the first to do that kind of performance publicly. I actually came across her through an old interview on YouTube, which I later used in one of my works. The only intervention I made was to slow down the moments at the end of each question, when Veronica Moser finishes answering and smiles, just to stay with that expression a little longer.

I showed the work at MMK while collaborating with the Korean poet Eon Hee Kim, whose writing I’ve loved for years. Her poems are full of gore, excrement imagery and she’s around the same age as my mother, which made the connection feel even more personal.

Bringing her poems together with Moser felt right. I had this impulse to get closer to something unspeakable beyond language or intellect, which is a bit ironic since I worked with a poet and text a lot in that show. But the project became less about text itself and more about what escapes articulation.

The world of sexual fetish and pornography fascinates me because it exposes the depth of human desire. It’s like dreaming: when you think of yourself as a composed, functional person or whatever, your dreams reveal the most irrational, grotesque corners of your mind. Pornography, in a way, does the same — it never fails to expose the gross and tacky parts of being a human.

Nora: It’s funny how it’s virtually impossible to imagine something that hasn’t already been made into porn. And I think that’s interesting in relation to what we talked about in the beginning – about the human desire to be clean, filtered and eternal. Pornography is this very dirty, bodily expression of another innate human desire. It’s this dichotomy between control, the ideal and the disembodied and dirt, fluids flesh and decay.

Mire: It’s also so fascinating how porn always reflects reflect our socio-political context. Porn often adapts, reverse, reinforce or play with different power dynamics that exist in society. It unveils how much desire and eroticism that’s embedded in power.