In May this year, the Taipei Fine Arts Museum and the Mori Art Museum in Japan will jointly organize and present the exhibition “Lee Mingwei and His Relations: The Art of Participation.” touring in Asia and curated by the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo in 2014. Born in Taichung, Taiwan in 1964 and now based in New York, Lee Mingwei is a world-renowned artist. He creates different participatory art projects to highlight the “public” and “social” aspects of art. Turning viewers silently looking at works into participants intervening in the artist’s projects, Lee Mingwei’s participatory art creates subtle emotional connections among people, and attempts to build a kind of micro social relations.
Lee Mingwei and His Relations gathers together fifteen major projects, including new work, providing the first opportunity to experience art spanning Lee’s twenty-year career in a single exhibition. Although the form of audience participation varies, from works that anyone can become involved in on the spot to works that involve registration in advance and/or selection by lottery, all visitors are encouraged to participate as much as possible. As well, to aid in understanding the historical milieu of Lee’s practice, artworks and quotations by ten artists, religious leaders and thinkers – Hakuin, D. T. Suzuki, Yves Klein, John Cage, Allan Kaprow, and Rirkrit Tiravanija, as well as Wu Mali, Michael Lin, Jun Yang, and Wu Chien-Ying – provide contemporary art contexts both global and local, which resonate on various levels with Lee Mingwei’s consciousness and concerns.
