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Lee Mingwei
Lee Mingwei (Chinese: 李明維; born 1964) is a Taiwanese-born American contemporary visual artist. He creates participatory installations, where strangers can explore issues of trust, intimacy, and self-awareness, and one-on-one events, in which visitors contemplate these issues with the artist through eating, sleeping, walking and conversation. Lee's projects are often open-ended scenarios for everyday interaction, and take on different forms with the involvement of participants and change during the course of an exhibition. He has had solo exhibitions in museums worldwide including The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, Mori Art Museum in Tokyo, and Centre Pompidou in Paris.
Mingwei's mid-career survey exhibition "Lee Mingwei and His Relations" (2014–2016) was conceived by the Mori Art Museum in 2014, and traveled to Taipei Fine Arts Museum (2015) and Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki (2016), with a European survey exhibition "Lee Mingwei: Li, Gifts and Rituals" at Gropius Bau (2020), which then traveled to Museum Villa Stuck (2021). He has participated at "Viva Arte Viva," The 57th International Art Exhibition - La Biennale di Venezia, curated by Christine Macel, and has been featured in biennials in Venice, Lyon, Liverpool, Taipei, Sydney, Whitney, Shanghai, and Sharjah and Asia Pacific Triennials.
Lee Mingwei was born in 1964, in Taipei, Taiwan. He was raised as a Chan Buddhist, and spent his summers in a monastery.
In 1993, Lee received a Bachelor of Fine Arts (B.F.A.) degree in textiles from the California College of the Arts, where two professors in particular, Mark Thompson and Suzanne Lucy, expanded his understanding of art. In 1997, Lee earned a Master of Fine Arts (M.F.A.) in sculpture from Yale University.
Lee's work focuses on the formation and contemplation of human relationships. His pieces typically involve situations that invite participants to reflect upon on their connections with others, or prompt them to create new connections with strangers. His work is often linked to Relational Aesthetics, a term coined by French art critic Nicolas Bourriaud to denote art that creates situations or environments that invite viewer engagement. Curators and writers have also contextualized such themes within Lee's work by referencing American artists Allan Kaprow and John Cage, who created work dealing with an audience's relationship to its environment. For his survey exhibitions, Mami Kataoka further proposes an Eastern context of connection and interconnectivity in association with Lee's work, while Stephanie Rosenthal and Clare Molloy would elaborate on the idea of "Li" (禮) and gift aspect of his work.
Lee's work also focuses on daily life, and involves staging everyday activities such as sleeping and eating within the museum space. For The Sleeping Project (2000–present) Lee or a host from the museum stages the act of "sleeping with" by placing two beds and several nightstands within the museum. For each of the days, museum visitors are selected through lottery to spend a night in the museum sleeping in one of two beds alongside their host. Participants are asked to bring objects from the space where they usually sleep, and the following morning they are to leave the objects on one of the surrounding nightstands. The objects remain on the nightstands for the duration of the exhibition. Later iterations of the piece have involved two strangers sleeping in the beds, rather than Lee. In a similar work, The Dining Project (1997–present), Lee or a host from the museum cooks and serves a visitor a meal that they then share together within the museum.
Many of his works draw from childhood experiences and memories of his family. For 100 Days with Lily (1995) Lee draws from his time mourning the loss of his grandmother by chronicling his experience spending 100 days with a narcissus from planting, to its growth, and eventually to its death and his mourning of the flower. He documents this experience in a series of photographs, onto which he superimposes lines of text marking one moment from each of the hundred days with the flower. The passing of his grandmother also inspired The Letter Writing Project (1998–present) in which participants write letters to someone expressing something they wish they had expressed before. Participants leave their letters within wooden booths Lee created for participants to write inside. If the participants mark the recipient's address, the museum mails out the letters, and retains the ones without addresses.
Lee also explores the concept of the gift in his work, drawing particular inspiration from Lewis Hyde’s book The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World. In 2009, for La Biennale de Lyon, Lee created The Moving Garden (2009 - present), a piece consisting of a granite slab from which visitors may take flowers. The visitors are then meant to bring the flower out of the museum, diverge from the path they would normally take, and along the way give the flower to a stranger.
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Lee Mingwei
Lee Mingwei (Chinese: 李明維; born 1964) is a Taiwanese-born American contemporary visual artist. He creates participatory installations, where strangers can explore issues of trust, intimacy, and self-awareness, and one-on-one events, in which visitors contemplate these issues with the artist through eating, sleeping, walking and conversation. Lee's projects are often open-ended scenarios for everyday interaction, and take on different forms with the involvement of participants and change during the course of an exhibition. He has had solo exhibitions in museums worldwide including The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, Mori Art Museum in Tokyo, and Centre Pompidou in Paris.
Mingwei's mid-career survey exhibition "Lee Mingwei and His Relations" (2014–2016) was conceived by the Mori Art Museum in 2014, and traveled to Taipei Fine Arts Museum (2015) and Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki (2016), with a European survey exhibition "Lee Mingwei: Li, Gifts and Rituals" at Gropius Bau (2020), which then traveled to Museum Villa Stuck (2021). He has participated at "Viva Arte Viva," The 57th International Art Exhibition - La Biennale di Venezia, curated by Christine Macel, and has been featured in biennials in Venice, Lyon, Liverpool, Taipei, Sydney, Whitney, Shanghai, and Sharjah and Asia Pacific Triennials.
Lee Mingwei was born in 1964, in Taipei, Taiwan. He was raised as a Chan Buddhist, and spent his summers in a monastery.
In 1993, Lee received a Bachelor of Fine Arts (B.F.A.) degree in textiles from the California College of the Arts, where two professors in particular, Mark Thompson and Suzanne Lucy, expanded his understanding of art. In 1997, Lee earned a Master of Fine Arts (M.F.A.) in sculpture from Yale University.
Lee's work focuses on the formation and contemplation of human relationships. His pieces typically involve situations that invite participants to reflect upon on their connections with others, or prompt them to create new connections with strangers. His work is often linked to Relational Aesthetics, a term coined by French art critic Nicolas Bourriaud to denote art that creates situations or environments that invite viewer engagement. Curators and writers have also contextualized such themes within Lee's work by referencing American artists Allan Kaprow and John Cage, who created work dealing with an audience's relationship to its environment. For his survey exhibitions, Mami Kataoka further proposes an Eastern context of connection and interconnectivity in association with Lee's work, while Stephanie Rosenthal and Clare Molloy would elaborate on the idea of "Li" (禮) and gift aspect of his work.
Lee's work also focuses on daily life, and involves staging everyday activities such as sleeping and eating within the museum space. For The Sleeping Project (2000–present) Lee or a host from the museum stages the act of "sleeping with" by placing two beds and several nightstands within the museum. For each of the days, museum visitors are selected through lottery to spend a night in the museum sleeping in one of two beds alongside their host. Participants are asked to bring objects from the space where they usually sleep, and the following morning they are to leave the objects on one of the surrounding nightstands. The objects remain on the nightstands for the duration of the exhibition. Later iterations of the piece have involved two strangers sleeping in the beds, rather than Lee. In a similar work, The Dining Project (1997–present), Lee or a host from the museum cooks and serves a visitor a meal that they then share together within the museum.
Many of his works draw from childhood experiences and memories of his family. For 100 Days with Lily (1995) Lee draws from his time mourning the loss of his grandmother by chronicling his experience spending 100 days with a narcissus from planting, to its growth, and eventually to its death and his mourning of the flower. He documents this experience in a series of photographs, onto which he superimposes lines of text marking one moment from each of the hundred days with the flower. The passing of his grandmother also inspired The Letter Writing Project (1998–present) in which participants write letters to someone expressing something they wish they had expressed before. Participants leave their letters within wooden booths Lee created for participants to write inside. If the participants mark the recipient's address, the museum mails out the letters, and retains the ones without addresses.
Lee also explores the concept of the gift in his work, drawing particular inspiration from Lewis Hyde’s book The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World. In 2009, for La Biennale de Lyon, Lee created The Moving Garden (2009 - present), a piece consisting of a granite slab from which visitors may take flowers. The visitors are then meant to bring the flower out of the museum, diverge from the path they would normally take, and along the way give the flower to a stranger.