Mire Lee's "gore-fest" art installation inside Tate Modern's Turbine Hall has been unveiled.
The large-scale sculptural artwork — titled Open Wound — reimagines the famous Turbine Hall as the inside of a body, transforming it into an eerie and fantastical factory.
It's the Korean artist’s first major presentation of work in the UK, and the installation sees Lee explore the tension between beauty and the grotesque on an a massive scale.
Open Wound is the 2024 Turbine Hall commission and it centres around a seven-metre-long turbine which hangs from one of the building’s original cranes, especially recommissioned for this installation. This obviously nods to the hall's name and museum's original use as Bankside Power Station, where coal and oil-fired turbines filled the main hall to generate electricity.
From this rusting turbine dangles vein-like silicone tubes, pumping dark pink viscous liquid which is collected in a large sloping tray underneath.
From here, the liquid is absorbed into 'skins' which are carried by technicians to drying racks, a process suggestive of an industrial production line. Once dry, they're hoisted to also hang far above the ground.
As the weeks go by, more and more of these hanging 'skins' — like meat cuts in a butchers — will be seen.
If that sounds gruesome, it's because it is. One critic has described the 2024 Turbine Hall commission as "the goriest yet."
What's also remarkable about this year's iteration of famous Tate installation — which has been supported by Hyundai Motor as part of a decade-long sponsorship — is that Lee is the youngest artist to ever be asked to take it on. She is just 36 years old.
Lee is also one of less well-known artists to be commissioned, with more established names like Anish Kapoor and El Anatsui having been previous invitees.
Open Wound is is the 23rd Turbine Hall commission since Tate Modern opened in 2000. The annual installation reaches an audience of millions, and some of the most enduringly popular have been Olafur Eliasson's The Weather Project (in 2003) and Ai Weiwei's Sunflower Seeds (in 2010).
But will Mire Lee's 2024 commission be remembered so fondly in years to come?
Mire Lee's Turbine Hall reviews
Broadly, art critics do like Open Wound, but they don't necessarily all love it. One was very much not a fan.
The central turbine is "strung up on chains, in the manner of a carcass in an abattoir" says Alastair Sooke in his Telegraph review, which he firmly believes is "astonishingly powerful." Sooke awards it four-stars, concluding that "Lee’s melodramatic creation...is as dark and unsettling as it comes."
"It’s like all of modern society [is] being forced to look in the mirror, and finding only a corpse staring back" is how Eddy Frankel in Time Out describes it. He thinks it's "brilliant" and is "the best Turbine Hall installation for years."
It's unsurprising, then, that Frankel has given it the full five stars for what he calls this "gory corpse of our industrial past."
"Horrible yet heavenly" is the headline on the Times' review. But it's just the three stars from Laura Freeman, as the contrast between its beauty and butchery prevents it from being a full-blown enjoyable experience.
It's "a stomach-churning commission" Freeman says, and while aesthetically she says she leans towards it being "a success," it still "did put me off my breakfast."
One critic really didn't like it however. Adrian Searle in the Guardian says that rather than invoking strong reactions, it is "hackneyed" and "overcooked."
With two stars, in his review he thinks Open Wound is rather "dismal" and simply an example of Lee's "shtick [getting] wearying...an artistic gambit of diminishing returns."
The Hyundai Commission: Mire Lee: Open Wound is now open at Tate Modern in London and runs until 16 March 2025. Entry is free.
— Here's all the other exhibitions on at Tate Modern this year