L ee Mingwei (b. 1964) is an artist who mends, reconciles, and remembers, and he eases us into a place where we do the same, mostly through performance. I didn’t say poke or cajole or bulldoze. His is the art of the gift — to give an opportunity, a space, and a means. I’d seen his work before, off and on over 20 years, not looking for it especially but happy whenever I’ve found it. I visited the de Young Museum in San Francisco a few weeks ago. Its exquisite American-art collection, not mammoth but each work a jewel, is always a stop. It’s like visiting a dear, old, comforting friend. Knowing the museum was also doing Lee Mingwei: Rituals of Care made a visit essential.
Lee is American and was educated here but grew up in Taiwan. I’d call him a performance artist who happens to be a magician. Performance art is less an object, though objects sometimes evolve from it, than an experience. The artist’s body — his actions, voice, and look — is a medium, but it takes two to tango. Viewers become actors, too, and co-creators with the artist.
His art is difficult to describe but wonderful to experience. He’s motivated by a spirit of generosity. It’s about trust, intimacy, and self-awareness. It isn’t upsetting or confrontational but humanizing. He started as a textile artist, and that’s still very much part of his work. He weaves a human connection. How is this articulated? Does it work at the de Young, where Lee, the artist, isn’t there, in the galleries, most of the time?
The exhibition is divided into half a dozen Lee projects that he has developed over the years and performed, usually in artist residences, in museums in America, Europe, and Asia. I’ve seen a couple and would describe him as priestly. He’s demure, quietly charismatic, and he draws us out, and not through guile.
The Mending Project, which Lee started in 2009, joins the artist or his surrogate, often a museum docent, and the visitor in a one-on-one, unscripted, brief time of togetherness. Uniting the two is something that needs mending. At the de Young, half a gallery is bare except for walls decorated with mounted, colorful spools of thread. A long table holds different kinds of needles, thread, miniature rolls of fabric and ribbons, and scissors, but nothing mechanical. There are two chairs. When I participated, my task, aside from being my usual witty, ornamental self, was to have an item that needed mending.
Living in rural Vermont, I was the visitor of the docent’s dreams. By nature, habit, and custom, we look bedraggled, threadbare, and makeshift. It’s what the Italians call in restauro, in perpetuity. City slickers sometimes think we’re feral.
No, I had no buttons missing, no hanging hems, and no sleeves worn thin by wrestling hogs. I wasn’t wearing twine for a belt. What I “did” have was a 40-year-old leather book bag, tough and supple, resolute and yielding, scuffed and faded to caramel. It has what my new docent friend called “that much-loved look.” Bits of the leather shoulder strap had thinned. Among my many faults is overstuffing it, with books, historically, but over the past few years with my trusty paper calendar, tissues, baby wipes, hand sanitizer, moisturizer, a bottle of sparkling water, an umbrella, my cellphone, a mirror, since the older I get, the vainer I’ve become, a flashlight, my checkbook, a dozen pens since they seem to evaporate, and whatever’s accrued to me over a period of days. I emptied it last week and at the bottom found a Christmas ornament — a cactus with red lights and a view of a covered wagon. I’d gotten it in Salt Lake City last year.
It’s my man bag. At times it’s Mary Poppins’s bag of tricks. At times it’s a hazardous waste dump. Over the years, the shoulder strap could take only so much. I thought on this trip it looked imperiled enough to break.
The Mending Project’s docent offered to mend it and did, picking with me a band of red paisley fabric that she wrapped around the worst-worn passages of the leather strap and carefully sewed. The docents at places like the de Young, the MFA in Boston, and the Walters in Baltimore — and there are many others — get intensive training, so much so I’d call them the best art historians. We chatted about her gigs as a local theater director in the Bay Area. One of the points of the exercise is that the “wound” in the object isn’t made invisible, however repaired it might be. It’s patched, and the patch becomes part of the object’s history.
The Mending Project can be cathartic, and I don’t doubt that some visitors come prepared with precious, iconic things like the apron Granny wore every Thanksgiving or a black beret belonging to a favorite, long-gone beatnik uncle. This is San Francisco, after all. As of a month ago, no one had brought anything with a bullet hole. The museum tells us, “This is not a tailoring service.” I came unaware that mending my ratty bag might be on the agenda.
The docent, a bit older than I, was a calming, reassuring presence, and working with textiles, I think, is good for the soul. It’s repetitive and expressive work that shows milestones. I’ve never this kind of interaction in a museum. Performance art usually creates a group dynamic meant to build a community through confrontation and around a cause. Lee’s project is a random connection. It’s also a twist on curatorial practice. The curators at the de Young normally focus on caring for objects. Here, they’re nurturing people and situations. It’s refreshing. And Lee’s work has nothing to do with identity politics. It’s about a moment of interaction.
In the next gallery is The Letter Writing Project. Lee designed a group of wood, translucent, very beige, low-lit, and serene writing booths. Each has a desk and writing materials — pencils and nice paper and envelopes, the kind we’d use for formal notes. Visitors can enter the booths — shoes off, please — and write a note to someone. He suggests unexpressed gratitude, an apology, or an offer of forgiveness. They can seal and address the letters — the de Young will mail them — or leave them for others to read.
I’m too hardened and cold a Yankee pellet, but this is California, and we live in a confessional age. It’s quaint and, goodness knows, I’m an advocate for handwritten letters. If a genre of art can ever be fully lost, this is a prime candidate. Most people under 30 can sign their names but, beyond that, don’t know how to write in cursive.
Some visitors don’t want to commune with the dead, and some don’t want even to talk to other people, like the lovely docent who mended my bag. For them, the touch-tone phone, online banking, and Amazon Prime are immensely liberating. The next gallery, showing Our Peaceable Kingdom, serves them, as well as those who are as chatty as I am. No self-revelation involved.
Our Peaceable Kingdom starts with an 1833 version of Edward Hicks’s The Peaceable Kingdom, one of more than 60 versions that Hicks painted between 1820 and 1846 and depicting wild animals, children, Native Lenapes, and Quakers living together in harmony. When the project began in 2020, Lee asked 14 artist friends to each make a copy of the picture. The copies aren’t literal but, rather, inspired. Each of these 14 artists then picks two artists he or she knows to make a copy. Being artists, some delivered and some didn’t, but, over the past four years, close to 70 versions have been painted. Thirty-nine were on view in Lee’s exhibition, each identically framed for a unity of look and each roughly the same size. On view as well is the de Young’s own Peaceable Kingdom, painted by Hicks around 1846.
It’s a fun as well as serious concept. Each artist has his own style, of course, and the artists are from all over the world. Some are German. Our Peaceable Kingdom premiered at a museum in Berlin, the Gropius Bau, whose front door was blocked by the Berlin Wall from the mid ’60s to the early ’90s. Three of the artists are from San Francisco. One, Chelsea Wong, deleted the Quakers — white people and colonizers, after all — to make a scene with “no desecration of land, animals, language, or spiritual belief.” Boring as well as fake. Emilio Villalba brought the figures closer to emphasize togetherness and used layered, dense brushwork to add weight and depth to the theme of unity among difference. Lee generated a family tree of scenes descended from Hicks’s as well as dozens of different takes on the themes of peace and diversity.
Some parents send their kids to summer camp, but Lee’s parents sent him each summer to a Chan Buddhist monastery where he learned simple living and mindfulness, which he defines as paying attention to everything he did. He has always liked spiritual places. Wisdom, and he sees this as the goal of religious belief, doesn’t come from the heavenly realm but from the mundane, from ourselves, from our experiences, and from our sympathy and empathy for others. He went to school in America, first studying textiles and then focusing on the art of qualitative relationships and memory as a work of art.
He’s American but also Taiwanese. Driving his patriotic feeling about Taiwan is its fluidity and stasis, its civic instability as well as a soulful reverence for family. Until the 1980s, Taiwan was a dictatorship, not a murderous, psychopathic one like the China across the strait but a place where the self outside the family was regulated and limited. The emergence of a democratic Taiwan and Lee’s radical desire for an American education put the tension between risk and trust at the top of his emotional and artistic agendas.
His first major art project, and it shares a gallery with his Mending Project, is 100 Days with Lily, from 1995. Its subject is his grandmother, who died when Lee was a teenager. Lee lived for a hundred days with a lily, first as a bulb and throughout its germination, sprouting, flowering, withering, and then death, keeping it with him all day and night. He picked a random time each day to record what he was doing at that moment. Mournful, yes, but experiential, placing a passage of his life within the cycle of the lily’s. Lee was a witness but also embraced reflection as a ritual. Superimposed on five photographs of Lee and the lily are one-line diary entries, a hundred in all, one for each day, listing what he was doing at specific moments, so the project is a self-portrait, too. It’s frank and very human.
Guernica in Sand unfolds in the grand lobby of the de Young. It starts as a sand painting based on Picasso’s 1937 depiction of the Nazi and Falangist bombing of Guernica, a small Spanish city packed with Basque separatists and Communists. Lee created most of it before Rituals of Care opened. Midway through the exhibition, at a special public event, he finished it in an afternoon-long performance. While he was finishing it, visitors, one at a time, could walk over it, defacing it. Impermanence — of good and bad things and of life itself — is a good theme. At the end of the day, the sand was swept into piles of tawny sand. They look like the inchoate mass the universe was before God got to work in giving it order.
Does Rituals of Care work? Yes, if the visitor puts the time and care into it. It’s performance art, but Lee’s there off and on for a few days during the run of the show.
In The Mending Project and The Letter Writing Project, it’s what we as visitors bring to the experience and the memories we carry with us that make the art. These projects aren’t self-contained. They’re contingent. The show starts with the very good, ten-minute introductory video, which is both biographical and an artist statement. It’s a tutorial in experiencing art that’s not entirely on the wall. There are no set explanations, since we bring so much to it. Each project has a single bit of introductory text. It’s a very different museum experience.
The book’s very good, though at $60 it’s also very expensive. There’s a nice introductory essay, an interview with the artist, and a description with lots of illustrations of his biggest projects.
We never see the exhibition in its entirety, since Lee comes and goes, as does Guernica in Sand. Letters are written and mailed, or started and not finished, and mended shoulder bags come and go. Memory, atonement, and brief encounters are the stuff of life. It’s a good surprise to see a museum and an artist place these front and center. Rituals of Care isn’t a shouty, polemical show, and it’s best to leave narcissism at the door.