Yein Lee: Accomplice is on view at the Parterre Gallery at Cukrarna Gallery in Ljubljana through August 30th, 2026. Curated by Ema Ograjenšek, the exhibition brings together five new sculptures and a large floor-based pool, turning the gallery into a shifting terrain of precarious relationships. Lee’s contemporary sculpture examines how bodies, materials, and environments react to pressure, instability, and change.
Based in Vienna and originally from South Korea, Lee works across sculpture and installation, treating matter as active and mutable. Her practice responds to ecological stress, geopolitical volatility, and migration, tracing how identities and environments are reshaped by intimate and systemic forces.
Biomorphic sculptures between nature and infrastructure
The five sculptures stretch into the Parterre Gallery’s architecture without settling into a fixed arrangement. Some stand alone, others form loose clusters, while a larger element hangs above the pool’s reflective surface. As visitors move through the space, shifting viewpoints continually transform the relationships between the works.
Lee’s biomorphic sculptures borrow forms from foliage and twigs, particularly branching veins and vascular systems, while also recalling cables, wires, and steel pipes that carry energy, information, and fluids. By merging botanical and industrial references, she exposes structural affinities between organic and engineered networks.
Working with polymer gypsum, epoxy putty, and found steel, Lee creates what she calls “trace bodies”: casts taken from materials and surfaces caught in unstable states. Pressure, erosion, and displacement remain etched into their surfaces, preserving the forces that shaped them.
A contemporary sculpture shaped by uncertainty
The works’ titles—공범자 Gongbomja (Accomplice), 수행자 Suhaengja (Practitioner), 파견자 Pagyonja (Dispatcher), 고행자 Gohaengja (Ascendant), and 감시자 Gamsija (Watcher)—cast the sculptures as active agents within an uneasy exchange between artist, material, and space.
In Accomplice, this tension reaches the viewer. With no prescribed route, movement, proximity, and shifting sightlines continually rearrange the sculptural landscape. Forms seem to lean, resist, fracture, and adapt, creating a charged space where fragility and strength coexist.
Lee treats instability not as a flaw but as the force through which form takes shape. Accomplice imagines bodies, objects, and environments as deeply entangled—never fully stable, yet never entirely separate.
Yein Lee: Accomplice, exhibition at CUKRARNA GALLERY (MGML, SLO), 2026
Photography by BLAŽ GUTMAN/MGML
