How Dan Lie’s art grows, mutates and decays in real time
Artist’s installation in dialogue with Korea’s funeral rituals, fermentation
“Earthy and pungent, with a hint of fruitiness” aren’t the descriptors one usually expects when recounting the scents wafting through a white-cube museum’s lobby at the heart of a densely packed metropolis.
Yet, they are precisely what strikes unwitting visitors stepping into the windowed ground floor of Art Sonje Center in central Seoul.
At the museum, the source of the mysterious smell lies half-shrouded behind the floor-to-ceiling drapes. Only by slipping between these fabric folds, dyed yellow with turmeric, can the audience come face to face with it — artist Dan Lie’s room-spanning installation that simultaneously grows, mutates and decays.
In “36 Months of Loss,” the title of both the centerpiece and Lie’s first solo exhibition in Korea, long tubes of “sambe” (hemp cloth) sacks stuffed with soil, germinating seeds and mushroom spores, drape down from the ceiling to the floor blanketed in rice straw.
Alongside these earth-filled structures are suspended bundles of chrysanthemums, as well as “onggi” vessels (traditional earthenware used for fermentation) containing ingredients for Korean rice liquor, “makgeolli.”
Over the course of the three-month show, the entire biodegradable installation undergoes transmutation before the visitors’ eyes in response to the ambient air and temperature. Mushrooms and flora sprout from the soilstuffed sacks; garlands of chrysanthemums begin to wilt; turmeric-dyed drapes slowly lose their color in the sun; bacteria and yeast inhabit the makgeolli mixture in clay jars.
Several chairs are placed in the corner of the room, inviting the audience to take a moment to contemplate the simultaneous living and dying of these entities.
Like many of Lie’s site-specific, mutating environments that have been brought to life in São Paulo, New York, Geneva and Singapore, “36 Months of Loss” is what the Indonesian-Brazilian artist calls the outcome of a collaboration with “other-than-human” agents — fungi, bacteria, enzymes, plants, minerals, spirits and ancestors.
“In the past 10 years, I’ve been very interested in exploring the passage of time and how it becomes noticeable within the [typical] time frame of an exhibition through materials that are growing, transforming and decomposing,” said Lie, who uses they/them pronouns, in a recent video interview with The Korea Times.
“As I began working with this change in materiality, I noticed mysterious, but very apparent, things happening in my work — for instance, organic matter heating up by itself or [unforeseen shifts] in the atmosphere. Like, what was going on there?”
That inquiry propelled the artist on a journey through the realms of science and spirituality in search of answers. It was through extensive conversations with mycologists, biologists, archaeologists and posthumanist thinkers that they eventually realized they weren’t just working with the passing of time, but rather with unseen “other-than-human” entities.
“I came to understand that these agents are actually my partners in creation and that the construction of the installations is an invitation for them to make this their home.”
By giving visibility to often-overlooked yet omnipresent “others” in their perishable art, Lie poetically proposes a shift away from humanity’s “monstrous protagonism” in this world, encouraging us to instead recognize our shared experience in the natural cycles of life, death, decay and renewal.
In dialogue with Korea’s ritual of grieving
The show’s title, “36 Months of Loss,” is a poignant reflection of Lie’s personal experience — the passing of their father at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.
As 2024 marks the third anniversary of this loss, the artist draws inspiration from the three-year filial mourning period (“samnyeonsang”) observed in Korean funeral traditions. However, rather than serving as an intimate memorial altar, their installation speaks to the broader concept of death and grief through multisensory presentations of decomposition, fermentation and annihilation.
“I’ve always been fascinated by death as the spark of philosophy, knowledge and interests that the human society has regarding our existence,” they noted. “Nowadays, I understand how important death rituals are for shaping our existence in this world and how urgent it is for many cultures to [destigmatize] collective grieving in daily life.”
To the artist, dying is akin to any other fundamental condition and necessity that humans experience. But in recent years, death and the process of mourning have become highly politicized — globally during the pandemic and, in Korea’s case, in the aftermath of the fatal peacetime disaster of the 2022 Itaewon crowd crush that claimed 159 lives.
How do we then make these conversations less taboo? How do we integrate dying into living?
Lie’s immersive, perishable ecosystem, which remains in close dialogue with local cultural materials and the surrounding architectural space, is their attempt to create an emotionally accessible space open for such discussions.
“That is why I use sambe cloth [worn by the deceased in Korean funerals] and pay homage to onggi as the centuries-old source of life because fermentation is one of the bases of food culture here,” they said.
The simultaneous usage of Art Sonje Center’s white-cube ground floor gallery and the adjacent “hanok” (traditional home design) structure as the venues for “36 Months of Loss” also mirrors the particular characteristics of the country’s cultural landscape.
“In Seoul, I was quite fascinated by how there are two contrasting material, aesthetic experiences present in the city: chrome metal [embodying modern] technology and stones representing ancient traditions,” they explained.
“So, working back and forth between contemporary white-cube architecture and the hanok space [steeped in] patina and memories got me thinking back to this relationship that South Korea maintains between modernity and tradition.”
In the end, Lie’s ever-mutating, organic installation embodies the profound power of site-specific art, offering visitors rare moments of contemplative respite that certainly make multiple visits worthwhile.
“36 Months of Loss” runs through May 12 at Art Sonje Center.