This week I went on a field trip to London’s tate modern art gallery, with artworks ranging from painting, sculpture, video, installation and performance art. One of the most stunning pieces was the giant installation that opened the door, Open Wound by Mire Lee, an industrial and textile space art piece of epic proportions that blew me away from the moment I walked in. It reminded me of some of the key words I’ve been thinking about over the last week – ‘boundary’, ‘skin’, ‘fabric’…
Mire Lee re-imagines the turbine hall as an ‘industrial womb’, using fabric sculptures to simulate the process of making ‘skin’. The wet ‘skin’ is produced by machines, dried and hung in the air, and ‘born’ from the body of the building, showing the fragility and plasticity of life. Fabric sculptures of various sizes hang from the ceiling, as if the factory has been transformed into a living factory. It explores the antagonistic relationship between machine and human, production and decay, soft and hard, new and old.
Another feature that struck me as very powerful was the sound effects, utilising the water flowing from the massive gears and then dripping down through the fabric onto the steel plates, they were like primitive musical notes that were quietly mesmerising, the fabrics also seemed to come to life in the air as if they had tentacles, the whole experience was very intricate.
Lee says, ‘Ultimately, I am interested in how behind all human actions there is something soft and vulnerable such as sincerity, hope, compassion, love, and wanting to be loved.’
As mentioned last week, The eyes of the skin, also examines the relationship between the body and space, and I wonder if the skin is a sense – a sense of touch; a representation of our boundaries – the membrane that separates the inside from the outside, the personal It is a container for personal form and consciousness.
The production, drying and hanging of the fabric ‘skin’ in the installation actually represents, I feel, the dissolving or plastic body. The different sizes of the hanging skin also illustrate the common nature of our fleshy existence.
References:
Pallasmaa, Juhani. 1996. The Eyes of the Skin. Chichester Wiley.
https://www.tate.org.uk/visit/tate-modern
https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-modern/mire-lee
Hyundai Commission: Mire Lee: Open Wound, Installation View. Photo © Tate (Lucy Green) © 2025 by Tate (Lucy Green) is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0 
Mire Lee’s Open Wound © 2025 by Chuni Mao is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0
Mire Lee’s Open Wound: Exploring Skin, Boundaries, and the Industrial Womb at Tate Modern © 2025 by Chuni Mao is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0
