The Letter Writing Project (1998–present) arose from the artist’s need to continue communication with his maternal grandmother after her death. Visitors are invited to sit and write the letter they have always meant to send but never took the time to write. Lee Mingwei leaves it up to each person whether to address their letter and have the Museums mail it or leave it unsealed for other visitors to read. 

In The Mending Project (2009–present), Lee Mingwei uses the simple act of sewing as a means to connect and share an experience. Visitors are invited to bring items of clothing in need of repair that Lee Mingwei or his designated host will mend and embellish. The mending is done with the idea of celebrating and commemorating the act of repair. This conscious embrace and highlighting of the fabric’s scar(s) speaks to the emotional work of mending as a means to deal with trauma and loss. Select garments will be chosen and added to a growing installation of items connected by thread to spools on the wall. 

In Sonic Blossom (2013–present), a singer approaches visitors with the offer of a song selected from the Schubert lieder (songs written for one voice). Lee Mingwei listened to this music with his mother while caring for her after heart surgery in 2012. If a visitor accepts this offer of beauty and solace, the singer then serenades them with a song of their choice. 

During the Iraq War, Lee Mingwei revisited Pablo Picasso’s iconic painting Guernica (1937). The experience resulted in the work Guernica in Sand (2006–present): a sand painting that partially recreates Picasso’s original. A meditation on impermanence and transformation, the work will be both completed and erased in a performance in March, and left in an unrecognizable state for another week. The work points toward both the weight of history and the persistence of hope through change.

Our Peaceable Kingdom (2020–present) unites a group of paintings that reinterpret the 1833 painting by Edward Hicks in the collection of the Worcester Museum of Art in Massachusetts. It is one of 62 works bearing the title Peaceable Kingdom that Hicks created between 1820 and 1849, a version of which is in our collection and on view at the de Young. Based on an Isaian prophecy appealing to Hick’s Quaker beliefs, it depicts animals, children, Lenape, and Quakers peacefully coexisting. Lee Mingwei invited 11 artists to reinterpret Hicks’s painting, then asked each to choose two other artists to do the same, thus creating “a family tree of copies with multiple descendants.” For the de Young, he asked artist Chelsea Ryoko Wong to create her version of peace; she in turn invited Emily Fromm and Emilio Villalba.

Chaque souffle une danse (Each Breath a Dance, 2024) reflects on the physical and social threats that the simple act of breathing has come to embody since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and George Floyd’s murder. For this artwork, Lee Mingwei concluded his daily meditation practice by placing a few droplets of sumi ink on an alabaster slate as the sun set, spreading the ink over the surface with several contemplative breaths. This work will be presented at the de Young as a video beginning in April, as well as a physical installation at Minnesota Street Project.