First published on ArtSlant.
Text by Robin Peckham.
Lee Mingwei: Liquid Forms
29 May – 27 June 2010
Osage Gallery
5/F, Kian Dai Industrial Bldg., 73-75 Hung To Rd., Kwun Tong, Kowloon, Hong Kong
Continuing a solid stretch of exhibitions examining the conditions of cross-cultural exchange within the global Asian heritage, Osage Gallery reveals at long last an exhibition for New York-based Taiwanese artist Lee Mingwei that has been in the works for at least a year. Surprisingly small and occupying only the third of the gallery not formerly given over to The Burden of Representation, the show includes two older works and one new piece. “100 Days with Lily” (1995) was once an iconic title in the conversation around the art of identity and multiculturalism, and this project in particular has not fared well in the intervening decade. Presented here as five framed prints detailing his actions during a single minute of each day, Lee kept a pot of lilies by his side for 100 days following the death of his grandmother, recalling the place of this particular flower within the Buddhist cosmology while also attending to the tired themes of the relationship between art and life. Similarly if more aesthetically available, “The Quartet Project” 2005-2007 rearranges Dvorak’s “American Quartet” by isolating each instrument on a video screen facing towards the wall, allowing for a pleasant play of light throughout the darkened room. Dealing rather obviously with the notions of separation and the remote experience of “home” from a foreign land, the project is vastly indebted to the identity-based initiatives that spurred on the last waves of postmodern art production throughout the closing decade of the twentieth century. Now, in a Hong Kong split between empires and largely at peace with that fact, the poetics fall flat.
But this exhibition is oriented around the debut of a new direction for Lee Mingwei, a piece that takes the graceful touch of these past works but gives it a life beyond the uneasy allegories of migration and change. “Stone Journey” (2009) consists of a number of pairs of identical objects mounted on wooden boards; on one side sits a rock, found by the artist in New Zealand and captioned with their approximate date of creation some millions of years ago, while on the other side sits a perfect replica cast in bronze, correspondingly captioned with the year 2009. In this piece the delicacy and futility of the artist’s biographical practice is finally revealed, no longer subject to the ideological mandates that constrained it and pushed it towards some notion of art historical “greatness” within its own time. Here, Lee attempts to capture time, to engage in circulation, to make real the titular liquid forms–all of which belongs to an impossibility that his earlier work, so preoccupied with its own political moment, failed to capture.