The Thatcher Hoffman Smith Award

November 15, 1998, Sunday, Late Edition - Final

Transforming Death's Wound: A Healing Art

By KAY LARSON; Kay Larson, an art critic, has practiced Zen for several years.

DATELINE: PHILADELPHIA

In the doorway of the room that houses "The Letter Writing Project," a graceful, meditative installation by the 34-year-old Taiwan-born artist Lee Mingwei, you duck under a noren curtain. The noren -- a common feature in Japanese architecture -- is a translucent white scrim that lowers the height of the doorway by about a foot. Your head nods, your back bends, and suddenly you are bowing.

Westerners don't expect to bow at an exhibition. But throughout Buddhist Asia, bowing is more than common courtesy. It signifies acceptance of the way of the universe: the importance of setting aside ego, of acknowledging the web that unites all beings, and of expressing gratitude for this miraculous gift of life.

Bowing, it turns out, is integral to Mr. Lee's exhibition, on view here at the Fabric Workshop and Museum through Saturday. Mr. Lee, who lives in New York City, has minded the teachings he received for six summers, beginning at age 6, in a Chan monastery. (Chan is the Chinese ancestor of Zen.) Sent by his dissident parents, who were busy demonstrating for Taiwanese independence, Mr. Lee rose for meditation at 3 A.M. and learned the simple power of concentrating on daily activities at the side of his Chan master, Mou-chan. Before he became subject to the draft -- and possibly to the "accidents" that had claimed the lives of sons of dissidents -- his parents packed him off to San Francisco, to a high school run by Benedictines. College and graduate school followed.

"The Letter Writing Project" is about bending to the mysterious necessity of loss: the commonplace transfigurations of death and passage. Three booths -- with walls of blond wood and frosted glass, akin to shoji screens -- offer stationery and envelopes on small tables. You are invited to express the unsayable to those who are beyond reach. (Next fall, letters will be ceremonially floated down a river on paper lanterns and burned, in accordance with Asian Bon festival practice.)

Slats in the walls display previous efforts -- envelopes addressed 'To my father which I will never see" or "In memory of Jamal," testaments to the shared difficulties of letting go.

When you take up the pen, the act of writing gives thoughts a curious weight. Some words seem to obstruct the pen, others to encourage it. The actuality of having written changes the writer subtly. Something is made real, then given away. In Mr. Lee's view, this "emptying out" is a healing.

To that end, he has varied the height of the table, obliging you to assume one of the three meditative postures of Buddhism: standing, sitting, kneeling. Each posture has its mental correlate: gratitude, insight, forgiveness. Thus the three components that create karma -- body, speech and thought -- are all activated as you write.

The karma has been great for Mr. Lee ever since he arrived at Yale, from which he earned a master of fine arts degree. Knowing no one, he put up notices all over campus promising to cook an intimate dinner for anyone who signed up. His mother asked what he was doing in school, and he said, "Hanging out at Stop & Shop." He explains: "My interest was to find a connection with a community through food. My grandmother used to do this."

Dinner became Mr. Lee's first gallery show, "The Dining Project," which opened at Lombard-Fried Fine Arts in SoHo on May 31, 1997, a week after his graduation from Yale. On an elegant tatami-mat platform, Mr. Lee served one person a night, chosen by lottery. Among the guests were David A. Ross and Eugenie Tsai of the Whitney Museum. Ms. Tsai's ancestors, like Mr. Lee's, came from mainland China, though they bypassed Taiwan and settled in the United States. At dinner, Ms. Tsai was initially nervous but quickly charmed. "I found myself talking about very personal things," she says, "although I had just met this person."

Ms. Tsai took "The Dining Project" to the Whitney last May; it was Mr. Lee's first museum show. Photographs of Mr. Lee serving dinner on tatami mats at the museum recently occupied half an issue of the French art magazine Ninety. The Whitney installation included the first two booths of "The Letter Writing Project." Mr. Lee's grandmother had recently died, and he had been composing long epistles to her containing everything he could not say during life to this forceful woman who studied Western medicine and lived in Japan (hence Mr. Lee's love of things Japanese). In its completed form at the Fabric Workshop, "The Letter Writing Project" is his tribute to her, and to the strange power of releasing strong emotions to the air and water.

GRAPHIC: Photo: Lee Mingwei in part of "The Letter Writing Project," an exhibition in which he deals with death and loss in a Chan (Zen) context. (The Fabric Workshop and Museum)

LOAD-DATE: November 15, 1998

SECTION: Section 2; Page 24; Column 1; Arts and Leisure Desk

LENGTH: 768 words

HEADLINE: ART / ARCHITECTURE;
Transforming Death's Wound: A Healing Art