Yein Lee - System of In-Between State

Yein Lee, Exhibition view, 15th Gwangju Biennale, (2024), Image courtesy of Gwangju Biennale Foundation, Photo : Studio Possiblezone

Installation View of 15th Gwangju Biennale 2024, System of In-between State 1-3, Commissioned by the 15th Gwangju Biennale and sponsored by Austria Ministry of the Arts, Culture, the Civil service and Sport. Photo by Heoyu

Yein Lee, System of In-between State 3, 2024, Steel, polymer gypsum, epoxy putty, natural elements, silicone, found object, fiberglass, acrylic ink, lacquer, 174 × 84 × 88 cm, Courtesy of the artist. Sponsored by Austria Ministry of the Arts, Culture, the Civil service and Sport. Commissioned by the 15th Gwangju Biennale. Photo by Heoyu, Courtesy of the artist

Yein Lee, System of In-between State 2, 2024, Steel, polymer gypsum, epoxy putty, branches, dry grape stalk, broken motor, repurposed house appliance, electrical cables, fiberglass, acrylic ink, lacquer, 175 × 100 × 110cm, Sponsored by Austria Ministry of the Arts, Culture, the Civil service and Sport. Commissioned by the 15th Gwangju Biennale. Photo by Heoyu, Courtesy of the artist

Yein Lee, System of In-between State 2, 2024, Steel, polymer gypsum, epoxy putty, branches, dry grape stalk, broken motor, repurposed house appliance, electrical cables, fiberglass, acrylic ink, lacquer, 175 × 100 × 110cm, Sponsored by Austria Ministry of the Arts, Culture, the Civil service and Sport. Commissioned by the 15th Gwangju Biennale. Photo by Heoyu

Installation View of 15th Gwangju Biennale 2024, System of In-between State 1, 2024, Steel, polymer gypsum, epoxy putty, branches, dry grape stalk, broken vacuum cleaner, electrical cables, fiberglass, acrylic ink, lacquer, 186 × 125 × 110cm(floor elements approx 300 cm), Commissioned by the 15th Gwangju Biennale. Sponsored by Austria Ministry of the Arts, Culture, the Civil service and Sport. Photo by Heoyu

15th Gwangju Biennale PANSORI a soundscape of the 21st century

Gwangju Biennale Exhibition Hall · 111, Biennale-ro, Buk-gu, Gwangju, South Korea

September 7–December 1, 2024

curated by Nicolas Bourriaud

Saâdane Afif, Haseeb Ahmed, Deniz Aktaş , Noel W. Anderson, Andrius Arutiunian, Kevin Beasley, Wendimagegn Belete, Bianca Bondi, Dora Budor, Peter Buggenhout, Angela Bulloch, Alex Cerveny, Cheng Xinhao, Choi Haneyl, Gaëlle Choisne, Anna Conway, Binta Diaw, John Dowell, Hayden Dunham, Liam Gillick, Loris Gréaud, Matthias Groebel, Matthew Angelo Harrison, Marguerite Humeau, Agata Ingarden, Hye Joo Jun, Jun Hyoung San, Kim Hyeong Suk, Kim Jayi, YoungEun Kim, Dominique Knowles, Agnieszka Kurant, Hyewon Kwon, Netta Laufer, Brianna Leatherbury, Yein Lee, Oswaldo Maciá, Mira Mann, Cinthia Marcelle, Vladislav Markov, Beaux Mendes, Myriam Mihindou, Na Mira, Saadia Mirza, David Noonan , Katja Novitskova, Josèfa Ntjam, Emeka Ogboh, Frida Orupabo, Lydia Ourahmane, Mimi Park, Philippe Parreno, Amol K. Patil, Harrison Pearce, Lucy Raven, Tabita Rezaire, Marina Rheingantz, Marina Rosenfeld, Max Hooper Schneider, Franck Scurti, Soomin Shon, Jura Shust, Marianna Simnett, Sofya Skidan, Anastasia Sosunova, Jakob Kudsk Steensen, Sung Tieu, Julian Abraham “Togar”, Unmake Lab, Yuyan Wang, Ambera Wellmann, Kandis Williams and Phillip Zach.

Born in Seoul, South Korea, and having lived as a foreigner in Europe, Yein Lee has been influenced by how identity politics, as related to the body, shapes subjectivity, agency, and otherness. Driven by personal, self-reflective questions around identity, Lee recycles and simultaneously uses prefabricated objects that she combines with molded and handmade elements. She gives a second life to discarded products such as steering wheels or faulty household appliances by combining them with electrical cables, glue, or epoxy putty to create new singular and enigmatic bodies.

The series System of In-between State comprises multiple bodily sculptures representing hybridity and fragility. The complex sculptures are cyborgian in form through the combination of human and technological structures. In a state of flux where it is uncertain whether the forms are coming to life or in a state of deterioration, the sculptures reflect the ambiguity in contemporary society of the relationship with technology. Denoting multiplicity that’s also marked by a fractured desire for connection, Lee’s sculptures reach out to their surrounding spaces asking to reestablish contact.

- Excerpt from the catalogue text of the Gwangju Biennale

System of In-between State 1-3 are commissioned by the 15th Gwangju Biennale and sponsored by Austria Ministry of the Arts, Culture, the Civil service and Sport.

Yein Lee, installation views of the exhibition "Anatomy of Fragility – Body Images in Art and Science" at Frankfurter Kunstverein, 2025, photos by Norbert Miguletz, © Frankfurter Kunstverein

Frankfurter Kunstverein

Anatomy of Fragility – Body Images in Art and Science

02.10.2025 — 01.03.2026

Curated by Franziska Nori, Anita Lavorano, Pia Seifüßl and Angel Moya Garcia

Yein Lee challenges the notion of the body as flawless, intact and always functional. Her sculptures take the form of anthropomorphic, life-sized figures that, stripped of their outer shells, reveal their inner structures. Lee constructs her works from electrical cables, steel pipes, computer parts, but also from branches, twigs and found everyday objects. Her material is at once synthetic and natural. It comes from industrial production, from the remnants of our digitally networked society and from nature.

Lee’s sculptures embody the contradictions of their origins—between handcraft and short-lived disposable objects, destined for material decay. Rather than resolving these oppositions, Lee makes them visible. Her works exist in an in-between state—oscillating between human and machine, the living and inert matter, organic growth and decay.

Born and raised in South Korea, Yein Lee has lived and worked in Vienna for several years. Her work draws on influences from classical sculpture, science fiction and cyberculture. She is fascinated by Medardo Rosso’s fragile wax figures and by the Baroque sculptures of Gian Lorenzo Bernini, who created the illusion of living bodies in marble. Lee is also drawn to figures from myth and literature that embody the idea of transformation as hybrid beings: Daphne’s metamorphosis, in Greek mythology, as she escapes Apollo’s assault by turning her female body into a tree; or the boy Namu Doryeong from the Korean founding myth, son of a celestial fairy and an earthly tree, who survives the great flood and from whom humankind descends.

Yein Lee explores the similarities of internal structures across organisms: from the network of human blood vessels, nerves, muscles and tendons to the branches and roots of plants. Her figures are made of permeable fibres that merge and break apart, grow in rhizome-like patterns and send out extensions in search of support in space. Lee conceives of the body not as a closed form. From these clusters she gives her figures multiple faces, cast from herself and from people close to her.

They reflect a world in which the boundaries between human and machine, nature and technology, self and other are increasingly dissolving. In this in-between realm, the body no longer appears as a stable centre but as an unstable interface, in a state of constant transformation.

At the centre of her reflections lies the impossibility of conceiving the body as a static entity. The body is transformation, extension and reconstruction, and at the same time, it is fragile. Yein Lee shares this experience from her own medical history: implants were anchored in her body, which healed and now support her. Her body has grown together with the metal of the screws—like a tree whose bark encloses an object that stood in its way. The body as an amalgam of the organic and the artificial, as a new normality—that is life.

Yein Lee’s work is permeated by the ideas of cyberpunk aesthetics: bodies appear extended, damaged, fragmented, shot through with cables and apparatuses. Lee presents fragile, precarious existences that linger in an in-between state. Transformation, metamorphosis and openness are not transitions but conditions, in which her sculptural beings continually reassemble themselves anew.

In the work Interlock Vertebra Devices, speculative implants for body enhancement appear packaged in plastic like fast-moving consumer goods. The desire for improvement, youth and functionality comes to the fore: the human being as driven by the pursuit of a better physical self.

Her works are pleas for a new corporeality: vulnerable, processual and beyond normative attributions. At a time when optimisation has become a trend, and technology a prosthesis and an extension of the body, Lee’s sculptures open up a field of possibilities: for other bodies, other futures, other forms of being.