A conversation with artist Lee Mingwei, featuring curator Lorenzo Fusi.
Lei Mingwei, The Mending Project, installation view, Biennale di Liverpool, 2010.
The calm pace of Lee Mingwei's voice and movements is interrupted by his clear laughter.
Dozens of thread rods are hanging form the walls, the threads crossing each other forming a coloured net in which the artist invites the visitors to bring pieces of garment to be mended, garments that he then borrows until the end of the show.
Lei Mingwei, The Mending Project, installation view, Biennale di Liverpool, 2010.
The mending project is a conversational work, an intimate emotional repair piece.
Together with Lorenzo Fusi – curator of the Liverpool Biennial - we met the artist and we talked about his project for Liverpool, its origins and the relevance of small things.
Born in Taiwan in 1964 and currently living in New York City and Paris, Lee Mingwei creates participatory installations, where strangers can explore issues of trust, intimacy, and self-awareness, and one-on-one events, where visitors contemplate these issues with the artist through eating, sleeping, walking and conversation.
Lee received an MFA from Yale University in 1997, and has held solo exhibitions internationally including Whitney Museum of American Art, Museum of Modern Art, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Museum of Contemporary Art, Taipei, Queensland Gallery of Modern Art, Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Mori Art Museum and has been featured in biennals in Venice, Lyon, Liverpool, Taipei, Sydney, Whitney, and Asia Pacific Triennials.