As a child in South Korea in the 1990s, Yein Lee was obsessed with new technology. Her father made sure to buy the best—the most current MP3 player, the smoothest-sounding speakers—and his passion stayed with her as an adult. By the time Lee left Seoul for graduate school at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, she was shocked to see her friends using relics while she had moved on to all the latest devices.
Lately, Lee has found herself less interested in keeping up with gadgetry. “Now my tastes are more—how would you say it—vanilla-ish,” she confessed. Still, her sculptures, which make prominent use of disused wiring, motors, and other technological innards, are very much entangled with the devices she knew and loved long ago, as well as with works of Japanese anime like Ghost in the Shell and Evangelion that she watched as a kid. Many of Lee’s sculptures resemble such films’ cyborgs, whose bodies are not unlike the machines that created them. In Vienna, where she remained after grad school, she realized her work had a lot in common with American sci-fi films like Blade Runner too.
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Masterfully constructed from metal and found materials, Lee’s sculptures can be downright terrifying—figures with multiple faces and partly formed limbs, some appearing to drip with silicone, like aliens emerging from primordial ooze, others seeming to gaze at themselves in mirrors. She concedes some similarity between her work and body horror, but mostly speaks of it as beautiful visions of all that humans can be. Her figures are without gender, and intended to dispense with conventional notions about the constructs and confines of disability.
“Instead of forcing bodies to be stable and functioning, we have to give space for fragile bodies,” she said. “I would like the body to be an open system, one that is exposed and fragile.”
Lee initially studied painting at Hongik University in Seoul, where she learned her craft by copying images of nature. When she mastered that, she moved on to working in an Abstract Expressionist mode. But by the time she graduated, she was more interested in working in three dimensions, and that passion has persisted: she tends to dive right in to her labor-intensive sculptures, bypassing advance sketches.
Her most recent works look back to her early art education. This past November, her exhibition at Loggia gallery in Munich, “Devouring Chaos,” featured sculptures alongside abstract paintings made by airbrushing and then lacquering steel plates, so that the color is encased beneath a layer that looks like goo. While these paintings may not represent anything in particular, it’s easy to see in them the conjuring of bodies emerging from voids. If they happen to recall recent experiments with AI-generated art, it’s anything but intentional. “A lot of people said it looks like digital art, but it’s handmade,” Lee said. “I found that interesting—that certain languages just come in naturally.”