Everyday Activities

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.

Family Stories

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.

The concept of Gift

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.

In The Mending Project (2009 - present), a mender is seated at a long table with two chairs against a wall of colorful spools of thread. Participants are invited to bring in something they would like to have mended or embellished, while they sit across from the mender and talk. After the mending, the visitors can then choose to take away their garment, or leave it at the gallery so that it may be attached to the spools on the wall, and return to collect it at the conclusion of the exhibition.

In Sonic Blossom (2013 - present), participants are gifted a song. Classical singers approach a single museum-goer and ask if they would like to receive a gift. If the participant agrees, the singer leads them to a seat and begins to perform one of Franz Schubert’s Lieder. Lee was inspired to create the piece while helping his mother to recover from surgery, during which time the two would listen to Schubert’s Lieder. The presentation of Sonic Blossom at The Metropolitan Museum of Art was selected as “The Best Classical Music of 2015^[7]” and “The Best in Art of 2015^[8]” in the New York Times.

LEE Mingwei and His Relations

In 2014, the Mori Art Museum held a mid-career survey exhibition of Lee's work titled "Lee Mingwei and His Relations: The Art of Participation." The show was curated by Mami Kataoka, Mori's Chief Curator, and included a survey of Lee's work spanning 20 years, as well as work by other artists such as Yves Klein, John Cage, Allan Kaprow, and Rirkrit Tiravanija to contextualize Lee's practice.

Kataoka highlighted the relevance of Lee's work in light of the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami as well as the importance of holding such an exhibition in Japan:

“In Japan today, with all of its loss, Lee Mingwei’s efforts have released similarly positive  energy towards rebuilding relationally and bringing connectedness into our awareness. While they also mean embracing an awareness of loss, the special experiences Lee creates call strongly on our senses and emotions and help us take our first steps toward becoming conscious of new relationality.”

Following its run in the Mori Art Museum, in 2015 Lee's survey show traveled to the Taipei Fine Arts Museum, and subsequently to the Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki in 2016.

Li (禮), Gifts and Rituals

In 2020, Gropius Bau organized a survey show titled "Lee Mingwei: 禮 Li, Gifts and Rituals," curated by Director Stephanie Rosenthal and Assistant Curator Clare Molloy.^[9] The survey would propose that the artist's practice is concerned with rituals of giving, receiving and care, and an exploration of art's potential to be a transformative gift:

"I see my works also in this way: sharing the gift of a song, the gift of contemplation or the gift of exchange with a stranger" -- Lee Mingwei

The opening was delayed due to the global COVID-19 pandemic, but Lee would develop new works Invitation for Dawn (2020) and Letter to Oneself (2020), inspired by Sonic Blossom and The Letter Writing Project respectively. Drawing on the participatory work Sonic Blossom, and giving and receiving something as ephemeral and intimate as a song, Invitation for Dawn virtually brought together a classically trained opera singer and participant on Zoom, with the singer performing a capella and gifting a song to their guest. Each singer had chosen a repertoire of three songs, which signal for them an "invitation for dawn," forming a sign of hope in the ongoing moment of global crisis. Following the opening, Invitation for Dawn continued to take place online as part of the exhibition until its conclusion.

Letter to Oneself invited the public to write letters to themselves, dealing with the questions: What is the current situation like for you? What worries you the most? What gives you hope? And asked participants to send their letters to Gropius Bau until 22 May 2020, selected letters were then read by actors Sithembile Mench and Marie Schuppan and included on the museum website.^[10]

Following its run at the Gropius Bau, in 2021 Lee's survey exhibition traveled to the Museum Villa Stuck, Director Michael Buhrs and curator Anne Marr speaking about the exhibition noted:

"[...] it is worth seeing the exhibition from the viewer's point of view, because at the center of Lee Mingwei's works are, in fact, the viewers themselves. It is very personal experiences of the artist that inspire the works in the exhibition, and it is new, very personal experiences of their own which visitors leave the museum. [...] Lee's works are a challenge for visitors as well as for the institutions that present his works. Into this challenge, however, the artist injects such a great deal of empathy, respect and open-mindedness that participation and engagement are activated in a very natural way. "Lee Mingwei: 禮 Li, Gifts and Rituals is indeed a gift, to all of us, which we at the Museum Villa Stuck accept with joy, in order to pass it on to our visitors."