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Exhibition View, Latent Rythme, Jack Barrett, 2023, Courtesy of Jack Barrett Gallery

2023
October 27 – December 16 2023
Taha Heydari, Yein Lee, Yanjun Li, Erik Nilson
At once skeletal and humanoid, Vienna-based Yein Lee’s sinewy steel sculptures, titled “Feelers,” bend and transform in space. Again alluding to our interconnectedness with technology, Lee’s sculptures explore our ever-increasing reliance on tech as a means of communication. The antennae-like limbs of the “Feelers” reach and protrude in unexpected directions, as if attempting to transmit and receive signals. If the sculptures are figures of sorts, the accompanying paintings on galvanized steel are speculative records of the movements and transmissions of those forms––the echoing waves depicting how their signals might travel in an attempt to communicate.
Excerpt from the exhibition text
The Feeler 1, 2023, 45 x 80 x 90 cm, Steel, Epoxy putty, Electrical wires, Acrylic ink, Lacquer, Bird spikes, Photography by Kunstdokumentation, 2023, Courtesy of Jack Barrett Gallery
The Feeler 1, 2023, 45 x 80 x 90 cm, Steel, Epoxy putty, Electrical wires, Acrylic ink, Lacquer, Bird spikes, Photography by Kunstdokumentation, 2023, Courtesy of Jack Barrett Gallery
The feeler 1, 2023, 50 x 64 x 200cm, Steel, Epoxy putty, Electrical wires, Acrylic ink, Lacquer, Bird spikes, Photography by Kunstdokumentation, Courtesy of the artist and Jack Barrett gallery
The feeler 1, 2023, 50 x 64 x 200cm, Steel, Epoxy putty, Electrical wires, Acrylic ink, Lacquer, Bird spikes, Photography by Kunstdokumentation, Courtesy of the artist and Jack Barrett gallery
status of for the time being, 40 x 40 x 140 cm, dry flower, electrical cable, plaster of paris, fiberglass, steel, wooden branches, epoxy putty, 2023, Photography : Yasmina Haddad
the meaning of speaking up, 25 x 25 x 145 cm, steel, plaster of Paris, wooden branches, repurposed broken printer, epoxy putty, electrical wires, 3d print, 2023, Photography : Yasmina Haddad
Installation view of “Breathing Timemarker”, 2023, school, Vienna, Photography : Yasmina Haddad
Installation views "Insides Out" with Daiga Grantina, Yein Lee and Tenant of Culture, Kunstverein Göttingen, 2023. photo: Joe Clark

Installation views "Insides Out" with Daiga Grantina, Yein Lee and Tenant of Culture, Kunstverein Göttingen, 2023. photo: Joe Clark

Inside Out, Kunstverein Göttingen, Germanycurated by by Sarah Crowe and Alke Heykes
August 19  October 1 2023
Yein Lee peels away the skin of her anthropomorphic sculptures to reveal a body that is fused with both the natural and constructed world. The outer lines of the body appear only cliché-like as an arbitrary frame to reveal how the human cosmos is permeated and defined by technology, organisms and context. There is no longer a separation between the body and the natural and built worlds, as the body is abstracted out into the world and the world back into the body. Lee’s sculptures begin with an emotional experience for the artist that necessitates a physical form in order to develop and process it. Just as this feeling becomes material, the artist’s sculptural process of making with her own body is her own physical outlet. In a painterly gesture, found objects made of steel, epoxy and acrylic resin, latex, electrical cables and used automobile parts, cast body parts, and natural materials like leaves and twigs, come together symbiotically to open up a body whose experience of the world is not separate from its existence in that world.
Excerpt from the exhibition text by Sarah Crowe and Alke Heykes.
​​​​​​​Install view of Devouring Chaos at Loggia, Munich, 2022, Courtesy of the Artist and Loggia
devouring chaos - growth of reconstructed time, overflowing bodies, and static electricity
broken chain saw, batteries, LED lights, drill motor, mixer motor, fake flower, dry branches, electrical wire, polymer gypsum, epoxy putty, steal, acrylic color, lacquer, 160 x 80 x 180 cm, 2022
​​​​​​​Install view of Devouring Chaos at Loggia, Munich, 2022, Courtesy of the Artist and Loggia
devouring chaos - growth of reconstructed time, overflowing bodies, and static electricity
broken chain saw, batteries, LED lights, drill motor, mixer motor, fake flower, dry branches, electrical wire, polymer gypsum, epoxy putty, steal, acrylic color, lacquer, 160 x 80 x 180 cm, 2022
Devouring Chaos, Loggia, Munich, Germany
November 26 – January 27 2023 
Devouring Chaos: A Compositional Model

It seems reasonable to suppose that the process of sculpting is an activity that produces order out of chaos. It might also be taking some central unexplained fact as a starting point. Suppose then that this fact is the concept of chaos itself. By convention or convenience, chaos arrives cloaked as disorder. Blame the mischief of everyday language. In contrast, scientific communities study chaos as a type of order, an unstable order in which temporal sequences form complex patterns. Chaos thus forms the condition for structure and coherence, and should not be confused with a proxy for randomness. It should also not be misconstrued as a simple explanation to understand Yein Lee’s exhibition Devouring Chaos.

You must know that to explain means ‘to flatten’, and surely, there are times in which making things plain is necessary and desired, but this is not that kind of moment. Instead, consider this: We hold these truths to be evident, that empire has instituted on earth a diagram of destruction, amongst which the main dimensions are wreck, ruin, and great loss.—That forms of government have become corrupted of their ends by means, and the right of people to alter them, to institute new government, systematically undermined.—That a long train of abuses and usurpation have inscribed themselves in such a way to topple the guards of the future enrichment of life. The alien observer would say, ‘The oil guzzlers and penicillin gobblers live in a society in which greed has become rational creed.’ Aliens speak in rhymes because they believe in mobilising poetry rather than science fiction to enter the digestive system of the ruling class of fast-food brains. Chew. Then Swallow. (Everything that happens after becomes automatic.)

The poiesis of Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase, No.2 is that it flattens different moments in time onto one single canvas. Composed of distinct body parts, and nested, geometric elements, the painting orchestrates the dynamics of a moving figure as rhythmic score. Stripped bare of its final form, one could tentatively hold as its essence a photograph of stroboscopic motion, or read it as a cinematic effect absorbed by the medium of oil. If you’re tempted to replicate this analysis to understand Devouring Chaos—or you’ve lost yourself somewhere along the blinking nodes of the prismatic, multi-limbed figure, organs assembled from broken machines (a mixer, a chainsaw motor), dried branches and synthetic flowers—then you might pass up the chance to grasp a phenomenon as it surpasses the sum of its parts. This cinematic technique is also known as ellipsis; the plot of destructive creation is mistaken for that of creative destruction, and destruction has been omitted as a normal cost of doing business. The gear shifters never asked, ‘When the system comes undone, will it be for better or for worse?’

Muscle memory. (The muscle behind contracts and squeezes forward, while the muscle in front relaxes to allow movement.) If you can reproduce cinematic effects through painting, you can also achieve painterly gestures through the process of sculpting. Watch veins protrude from steel, bloodshot, airbrushed, glistening alloys. Notice how they’re not products of brushstrokes but the aftermath of lightning shocks sent through metal. Instead of joining two pieces of cooperative materials, you’re witnessing a shared sensorium with otherworldly existence, how time has been folded into matter. It knows, what you’ve known all along, but have been misled to disbelieve: There have always been alternatives. (Psst, they exist in real-time). And in this mathematics of montage you’ll find poetry produced from reality:

Look at that!
The last order of chaos

A figure merging into itself
Time arrested and time passing

Why does the flap of a seagull’s wings
Alter the weather forever

They show the bones
They hide their weapons; stand corrected

Numbers found nothing like the old ones
With rounded-off values entered into the system

Neat remains, irreversible, enraged
There lies the portrait of all ruin

And so the death of a butterfly
Travels as the sound of thunder

Life is full of changes
The rest is found in motion

Life is full of changes
You just need to ride with it

Text by Steph Holl-Trieu


​​​​​​​Install view of Foreign Object Debris, 2022, Photography by Kunstdokumendation, Courtesy of the Artist​​​​​​​
​​​​​​​Install view of Foreign Object Debris, 2022, Photography by Kunstdokumendation, Courtesy of the Artist​​​​​​​​​​​​​​
​​​​​​​Install view of Foreign Object Debris, 2022, Photography by Kunstdokumendation, Courtesy of the Artist​​​​​​​​​​​​​​
​​​​​​​Install view of Foreign Object Debris, 2022, Photography by Kunstdokumendation, Courtesy of the Artist​​​​​​​​​​​​​​
Foreign Object Debris
The title "Foreign Object Debris" refers to the term "foreign object", which is defined as any kind of external contamination that enters the body and causes system failures in medicine or technology. The sculpture series, which conveys the concept of repair, care, and fragility, consists of elements of kelp forests, lotus leaves, logs, and a broken spaceship. The elements, drawn directly by hand with a plasma cutter, sometimes form a physical object, a metamorphic body. Based on personal experiences, I began to question who has the right to be "I" or "you" and to mix subjectivity. My attention expanded to the normativity of the body, the concept of the body, and more bodies. Then: metamorphic bodies as autonomous agencies, the presentation reflecting the complexity of body matter concerning the hybridity between the organic and the technical; a chain of theoretical, social, and political effects. I have been thinking about the concept of repair and fragility. To understand bodies as hybridity, we must also understand the spaces we live in as hybridity. The observation of technological devices that are part of my body in daily life (or my tooth) and my interest in the forms of biological organisms come together as corporeal matter in an environment where domestic and public life intermingle in an operating room. In Foreign Object Debris, the anthropomorphic figures are molded in an emotional state that evokes empathy in the viewer. These human-like figures repair each other, they repair their skin. The mirror reflects the viewer and the figures. Sometimes a mirror only reflects a figure and not the face of a visitor when a viewer looks into it. So the concept of the "foreign body" becomes unstable - it can mean all of us, depending on the perspective. 2022
​​​​​​​Install view at Paulina Caspari, 2022, Photography by Thomas Splett, Courtesy of the Artist and Paulina Caspari​​​​​​
Yein Lee & Nour Jaoda
Paulina Caspari, Munich, Germany
October 29  December 2 2022
" The sculptures by Yein Lee shown here revolve around the human body as signifier. She combines single casts of isolated body parts – her own or those of her friends – with forms made of steel, epoxy and acrylic resins, latex, and electronic cables, as well as used steering wheels and motorcycle parts. The (larger than) life-size anthropomorphic figures that emerge, made from dark, synthetic materials, contorted bodywork elements and electronic scrap, disclose glimpses of internal cavities devoid of organs. These entities are all in full agreement that the physical boundaries between natural and artificial, between grown and fabricated, and between human and non-human have long since been overcome. The willful (technological) worlds of objects and environments have not merely entered into our bodies, they are now its constituent parts. At the same time, as tech-junk characters that seem as if they may well have escaped from a sci-fi or body horror film, Lee’s sculptures test the charged vocabulary of classic sculptural poses. Moth flapping inside of me (2022) stands evenly balanced, while The rate of regenerating in decay process (2022) assumes a classical contrapposto pose, with one leg bearing the weight of the body while the other remains free. in other’s shoes – maybe no need for shoes (2022) crouches, deep in thought, while But in the end, what’s the difference between the foreign object and me? (2022), holds a mirror to their fragmented face, reassuring themself. The hybrid figuration of these sculptures makes apparent the possibility of both a transgressive dystopia and a ‘post-human’ opportunity space for new performative and relational bodies. Lee’s works depicts the body, and sculpture itself, with all its fragmented forms and radical instability, as an unfinished, open system that is still evolving."
Excerpt from the exhibition at Paulina Caspari, text by Franziska Margarita Linhardt
​​​​​​​Install view at Paulina Caspari, 2022, Photography by Thomas Splett, Courtesy of the Artist and Paulina Caspari​​​​​​
​​​​​​​Install view at Paulina Caspari, 2022, Photography by Thomas Splett, Courtesy of the Artist and Paulina Caspari​​​​​​
Exhibition view of On the Edge of all this Sprawl of Night and Cities, 2023, Super Dakota, Brussel, Photography by Isaac Lythgoe, Courtesy of the artist and Super Dakota
​​​​​​​Install view Rejuvenate Body Order Now at Le Box, 2021, Photography by Kristofer Hart, Courtesy of the Artist and Le Box

​​​​​​​Install view Rejuvenate Body Order Now at Le Box, 2021, Photography by Kristofer Hart, Courtesy of the Artist and Le Box

Although Lee’s sculptural creatures capture experiences and emotions that seem utterly human, the human figure is rarely present as such. At the most, it manifests by metonymy as body liquids or in prosthetic forms. In Rejuvenate Body Order Now, a solo show held at the artist-run space Le Box in Toulouse in early 2021, the human body appears fragmented, recognizable in prostheses made of 3D-printed skeleton parts and tech waste. Encapsulated in egg-shaped plastic membranes—as if they were still-growing organs or commodities wrapped in cellophane—five metallic black prostheses are displayed in a way that suggests that they can be ordered at the kiosk display and mounted to the body. Loosely hanging wires and cables are just waiting to be connected to organic veins and nerves. Were prostheses traditionally conceived to replace missing limbs, the detachable body parts in Lee’s sculptures play with the possibility to modify, rejuvenate, and enhance one’s body with technological extensions. As such, they become figurations of a shifting conception of the body as a permeable and open system, where biological boundaries are pushed by prosthetic augmentation.
Like science fiction speculation, the exhibition dwells on a (soon real?) transhuman condition in which self-reparation or self-enhancement is only a matter of mechanical engineering. Still, it is clearly not only about improving the body’s functional capacities. The silver piercing on the hipbone or the handless arms—which look like cyberpunk weapons—flirt with the idea of prostheses as ornamental accessories. However, this emancipatory promise of cyborg-like self-modification seems overturned as the plug-on prostheses turn into merchandise. With its suspicious and triggering wording, the exhibition title—which reads like spam mail—mimics the imperatives of self-optimization industries. Playing on our fear of never being good enough or of aging (and ultimately dying), they impel us to respond to their offers. Lee explores how the transhuman body is entangled in a neoliberal logic in which we would have to pay for our bodies to manage our human capital (even more than we already do). Instead of liberating us from constraining categories, the dream of bodily enhancement has been caught up in a sticky web of market interests that ultimately places the subject in the role of a consumer.
In forms shaped by intuitive and painterly gestures, Lee’s sculptures present us with multiple figurations of the body: technology-as-body, body liquids without a body (a body freed of boundaries?), bodies of longing, and the tech-enhanced body. Shapeshifting and ambivalent, technology manifests as a fragile creature always on the verge of becoming obsolete, as a vector for transhumanist visions, as devices inscribed in neoliberal consumer culture, or as a condition for connection. What permeates through many of her sculptures—be it creaturelike vessels or prosthetic forms—are the desires and anxieties related to living intertwined with technology.
Excerpt from Portrait Yein Lee written by Johanna Thorell, CURA Magazine

The man who lost his skeleton, Galerie Derouillon, Paris, France
Life on its own, Kunstraum Schwaz, Schwaz, Austria
Recasted Relations, Exhibit, Vienna, Austria
And then an insurmountable tension, to the level of incommensurability, Palazzo San Giuseppe, Polignano a Mare, Italy

2022 
Portal, Final Hot Desert, Salt Lake City, Utah, USA (Solo)
Reference Festival „Infinitude“, Schinkel Pavilion, Berlin, Germany
Klammern aus denen Blätter Sprießen, Hunter Shaw Fine Art, Los Angeles, CA, USA
Needle & Balloon, Curated by Michal Stolárik, Synagogue - Center of Contemporary Art, Ján Koniarek Gallery, Trnava, Slovakia
Für Dich, Altan, Südtirol, Austria