The artist’s installation at Secession is undoubtedly spectacular, but does it move beyond that?
Mire Lee’s largescale installation transforms the Secession’s main gallery into an abattoir. Red liquid (a viscous mixture of water, iron oxide, methylcellulose and sawdust, among other ingredients) drains down a stained sheet-metal slope that makes up one wall and puddles under a floor constructed of metal grids. At its heart rests the bleached white barrel of a concrete-mixer truck, sliced open to reveal its spiralling, red-splattered ribs as it revolves, like the bloated corpse of an eviscerated whale in perpetual agony. Connected by cables and tubes, each part of the installation seems to be connected as part of a closedsystem ouroboroslike whole, reconstituting the gallery as an industrial machine, the industrial machine as an organic form and the whole building as an ecosystem, each stage chewing through or overwriting the one that precedes it. And each of which, be it translation or metaphor, might be one way of describing what the Secession itself, or any exhibition space for that matter, is.
If the cement mixer is carved open, so is the Secession, with natural light now penetrating its stripped-back roof. While a row of whitewashed promotional banners for past exhibitions has been skied across the wall opposite the metal slope, and onto which words such as GOLD, MUTTERNAME (mother’s name) and GALLENSAFT (bile) have been added in brass leaf, alongside Korean characters graffitied in black paint. That you can still make out some of the original promotional texts in reverse gives the panels the feeling of a multilingual, multicultural palimpsest: a mirror to the layered metaphors offered by the sculpture as a whole. But it would be a stretch to say that the work, while undoubtedly spectacular, ever moves much beyond that: it’s all brutal, poetic form rather than content or a message in and of itself. For some of those last, you need to traipse (about ten minutes) over to the Korean Cultural Center, where three of Lee’s earlier videoworks are on show in a parallel show titled Women I loved. Each of which presents the female body in a different context: Sleeping Mom (2020) features the artist’s mother, on loop, doing what it says in the title; Faces (2016), which focuses on the faces of Japanese women riding the subway shortly before they are about to be groped (excerpted from pornography); and Veronica Moser (2022), which presents an edited interview with the eponymous Austrian pornstar and scatologist, who describes how from being bored as a secretary she moved into nude modelling, to pornography and, eventually, to shit-eating. In these works, the subjects are an embodied form of all that is abstracted in the installation at the Secession. In each video the question of whether or not the subject’s actions come of their own volition is raised in a different manner. Questions of agency and ownership are in play, as well as what it is that makes us something more than a system of chemistry, physics and biology, all of which gives these works a feeling of greater depth and sophistication than the big brash sculpture at the Secession.
Mire Lee: The Heart of My Machine is Golden Lead was at Secession, Vienna, 26 June – 26 August
From the October 2026 issue of ArtReview – get your copy.
Read next The Uncontainable Mire Lee
