The Brooklyn Rail

Passing through the dusty, concrete jungle that LACMA’s ongoing expansion has made of Mid-Wilshire and entering the pseudo-Brutalist, above-ground bunker that is Sprüth Magers, it feels apt that Mire Lee’s current exhibition, Faces, takes the most desiccated parts of our built environment and our bodies to create a presentation that seemingly prizes the last remnants of a tortured existence perennially under threat of annihilation.

In this museological display for the end of the world, concrete, steel, rubber, and thermoplastic contortions rest on low pedestals, lifted slightly off the floor in a manner that, despite their evident decrepitude, assures any onlooker of their preciousness. Titled Heads (2025), these sculptures, much like the majority of the exhibition, almost appear to be artifacts of both a post-apocalyptic world and of Lee’s practice itself, as if all that remains of her work is what’s left in her studio.

The Heads are interspersed with and sometimes attached to poles—stand-ins for the body, but also contraptions that the body might be attached to, voluntarily or otherwise. Recalling both subway handlebars and modern-day crucifixes, they perhaps inadvertently point towards one of Lee’s video works, Faces (2016), which collages together the zoomed-in faces of women in Japanese pornography during the moments before any sexual activity or violence takes place. Many ride the bus or subway with vacant expressions of anticipation, dread, or numbness—acutely aware, unlike the viewer, of the particular fate that will befall them. Projected onto a gridded wall of steel sheets with weathered stains that could be easily mistaken for blood spatter, the video’s scaffolding looks itself to be the site of some traumatic episode.

We’ve all watched content like this of our own volition, buffered by a degree of willful ignorance that, as Lee confronts us solely with the humanity of the participants, becomes ever more difficult to maintain. Do men, upon identifying with the male commuters and bystanders pictured—who are privileged by the blurred anonymity of their faces—feel some responsibility or guilt that mirrors my fear? While neither position fully obviates the lingering taste of abject arousal, the eroticism of this imagined fear is tempered by Lee’s insistence on the lived experience of her subjects. Thus transfigured back into individuals in the eyes of the beholder, these subjects may, here, however briefly, be freed of their consignment to objecthood.

What similarly recurs throughout the exhibition is a strong empathic desire to rescue the sad, distressed characters that inhabit Lee’s world. A creature, if we can call it that, twitches and churns on the floor. Is it alive, or is its motorized heart the equivalent of a medical defibrillator—or the device used in a later episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine to manipulate the dead body of one of the alien Vorta into appearing alive—jolting the poor skeletal creature with electric shocks that produce brief fits of… is it pleasure, or is it pain? Within its concrete bath of brown slime, Lee’s mess of hybridized organs pulls on the heart strings, forcing one to imagine what events must have led it to languish in this degraded state. And around the perimeter of the room, the works Lee calls Faces (2025) stare back at us, divorced though they are from any semblance of humanity. To create these monstrous visages Lee has stretched distressed, red-tinted, methylcellulose-treated polyester fabric within twenty-four modest steel frames, like decaying flesh pulled taut to its un-moisturized breaking point.

Recalling the face of Doctor Who’s Lady Cassandra—a disembodied being who, driven by an insatiable desire to enhance her beauty, has become a kind of sentient painting, a sheet of skin stretched within a frame—the 2025 Faces summon further associations from the realms of science fiction and body horror. Last year’s The Substance similarly sees Demi Moore’s image-obsessed character transformed over the course of the movie into a puddle of blood and guts following her abuse of a youth serum. While in these instances, vanity begets monstrousness, Star Trek: Voyager provides an evocative counterpoint in the form of an alien race known as the Vidiians who seek, by any means necessary, to stave off extinction. Afflicted by “the Phage,” their organs continually fail, and without a cure they steal replacement organs from others, a process that causes their complexions to decay in much the same way as Demi Moore’s body in The Substance.

Such pseudomorphic comparisons prompt a consideration of motive: while some of the faces in question are the product of a will to survive, others are born from an obsessive desire to achieve perfection. Can augmentation serve as both savior and downfall? But then again, it is the very psychological pressure to perform, to retain the skin of adolescence, to deny our imperfections, to stave off the inevitable, that ultimately corrupts. Is the implicit violence directed at the women in Lee’s 2016 Faces all that different from the presumed violence that was used to create her 2025 Faces? Both works force the viewer to weave a narrative context around the limited information provided by the artist—whether a pseudo-biological specimen, or a brief rumination on an expression laden with foreboding. In doing so, they prompt our imaginations to wander, often to the most painful, detestable scenarios we can imagine, undoubtedly sourced from those cultural touchstones that provide a point of reference or plausible explanation, however uncomfortable.

To experience Lee’s work and world is to sit, or more so stew, in such inexplicably pleasurable discomfort. Only the artist’s Sleeping Mom (2020), trapped in the inescapable time loop of slumber, retains her unvarnished humanity, as a mother always must.