At Cukrarna’s Parterre Gallery in Ljubljana, Yein Lee stages Accomplice, five sculptures and a ground-based pool installation that hold form and matter in a state of continual negotiation.
Cukrarna, the exhibition house run by MGML, the Museum and Galleries of Ljubljana, gave its Parterre Gallery over to Yein Lee for the summer of 2026. Accomplice, on view from 21 May to 30 August, gathers five sculptures and a ground-based pool installation, each one conceived for this room and reaching out into the room around them. Together they form what the exhibition calls a landscape of precarious relations.
At the core of the work sits a condition of “material becoming.” Form and matter arrive not as fixed things but as “sites of continual negotiation,” shaped by forces that run past any stable control. The sculptures read as caught mid-process, held in the act of transforming, deforming and adapting rather than settled into any final state.
That instability is not only formal. In Lee’s practice, processes that shift and adapt line up with wider conditions of ecological stress and geopolitical volatility, where environments, infrastructures and bodies are pushed into pressure and fatigue. Matter here is never passive. It responds, shifts and reorganises under strain, “active and relational” rather than inert.
The forms emerge, in the exhibition’s own words, through “abrasion, accumulation, and provisional balance.” The room trades the solidity a gallery usually promises for material instability and spatial uncertainty. The pool anchors it all at floor level, a flat horizontal ground against which every leaning, hanging, precarious element is measured, and into which the sculptures seem to sink and rise.
Which is where the title earns itself. An accomplice is a partner in an act, and Lee casts matter in exactly that role: not a substance to be shaped and left behind, but a collaborator that pushes back, keeps moving and refuses to stay where it is put. At a moment when so much of the built and living world runs under load, Accomplice turns that pressure into something a body can stand inside.
