It also marks Lee’s return to the Bay Area, where he spent his teenage years and later attended California College of the Arts before pursuing an MFA at Yale.
When visitors arrive, they are greeted by “Guernica in Sand,” a massive mandala-like sand drawing of Picasso’s “Guernica” on the atrium floor. The original grayscale painting was an anti-war gesture in response to the 1937 bombing of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War. Lee’s version is in color and features an additional comment on the cyclical nature of creation and destruction. On March 23, Lee will complete the sand drawing while other performers simultaneously walk across it.
Another riff on an extant painting comes in the collaboration “Our Peaceable Kingdom,” in which Lee asked 14 artists to create a rendition of Quaker folk artist Edward Hicks’ “Peaceable Kingdom,” a pastoral scene of assorted animals. Each participant then invited other artists to do the same. The resulting 39 canvases feature a broad range of stylistic interpretations. Hicks himself created more than 60 versions of the painting — one of which, dated circa 1846, is in the de Young’s permanent collection.
Lee Mingwei, “The Letter Writing Project.” Photo Courtesy of Mori Art Museum, photo by Yoshitsugu Fuminari.
Photo Courtesy of Mori Art Museum, photo by Yoshitsugu Fuminari
While these works broadly illustrate the exchange of ideas and relationships in art communities, Lee’s work shines when at its most understated and personal.
In “The Mending Project,” visitors are invited to bring clothing needing repair to be mended by a professional tailor, with whom they can sit and converse during the process. The sewing station shares a gallery with photographs titled “100 days with Lily,” documenting Lee’s tending of the titular flower as a memorial ritual for his grandmother.
It would be an understandable error to mistake the physical structures and objects included in these artworks for the artworks themselves. The real art is the experience of human connection and intimacy that these objects facilitate.
The best example of this is “Sonic Blossom,” an artwork with no fixed physical location, scale, appearance or sound. The participatory performance consists of a roving opera singer approaching random museum-goers and offering to sing them one of Franz Schubert’s lieders. The songs are significant to Lee because he listened to them with his mother while she was recovering from heart surgery.
Lee Mingwei, “Our Peaceable Kingdom.” Courtesy of Lee Studio. Photo Courtesy of Gropius Bau, photo by Laura Fiorio.
Photo Courtesy of Gropius Bau. Photo by Laura Fiorio
Usually, we expect to be the ones who enact looking at the works of art in museums. Here, the art acts on us. But perhaps Lee’s work is only a reminder that that’s what always happens anyway.
The pieces in “Rituals of Care” remind us that art is always already about human relationships and connection. That’s easy to forget amidst the glitz and glam of contemporary art. Lee’s is anything but. It’s as mundane as everyday life, as raw and vulnerable as you are willing to be.
