TBA21 Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary

Dan Lie

Dan Lie is an Indonesian-Brazilian artist whose work investigates the porous boundaries between life and death, growth and decay, presence and disappearance. Born in 1988 in São Paulo, Brazil, and currently living and working in Berlin, Lie draws from their diasporic heritage and queer identity to create installations that are as much living environments as they are contemplative spaces.

Their practice bridges scientific observation with spiritual cosmologies, using organic materials—such as fungi, soil, plants, textiles, and decomposing matter—to embody temporal processes. Rather than presenting fixed forms, Lie cultivates shifting ecosystems where time itself becomes the medium. Through the natural transformations of these materials, their installations grow, wilt, and rot, echoing cycles of becoming and passing, and inviting audiences to witness impermanence in action.

Lie challenges linear and binary systems of thought, particularly those rooted in dominant Western paradigms. Their work embraces ancestral knowledge, ritual, and ecological interdependence—foregrounding a poetics of care, vulnerability, and transformation. The spaces they construct ask urgent and intimate questions: How do we mourn? What does it mean to share space with what is decaying? Can decay be a site of knowledge and resistance?

Through these processes, Lie opens pathways between the spiritual and the scientific, the body and the environment, the personal and the collective. Their practice has also been thoughtfully explored in the publication Scales of Decay (Verlag Kettler, 2021), which delves into the material and philosophical dimensions of their work.

Related program

Daniel Lie The Reek Testimonial, 2024