Lee Mingwei’s artwork Our Labyrinth will be performed continuously from the 26th of May to the 15th of June in the world-renowned Turbine Hall of the Tate Modern museum, marking the first time that this exhibition space has been wholly dedicated to showcasing work by a Taiwanese artist. This will be the first time that the piece has been staged live at the museum, as a large-scale solo piece, since its acquisition in 2020. To highlight this special showcase, Lee Mingwei has extended the work for the iconic space of Turbine Hall, a space that serves both as symbol of the museum’s industrial past and an exclusive exhibition space for world-famous artwork.
Inspiration for Our Labyrinth came from the artist’s trip to Myanmar in 2014, where Lee observed that, regardless of their faith, local visitors would remove their shoes before entering temples, pagodas or mosques, and volunteers in these sacred sites constantly sweep the floor as a ritual of preserving the spiritual and physical ‘purity’ of the space. As Tate Modern notes, Our Labyrinth transforms the act of sweeping into a contemplative ritual performed by dancers, bedecked with bells, slowly sweeping grains of rice into a maze of patterns across the floor of Turbine Hall.
This is the first time that Our Labyrinth will be performed by two dancers simultaneously, against its original incarnation as a solo performance. The exhibition will involve a number of renowned dancers from Taiwan and around the world, including Yen-Ching Lin, Liu I-Ling and Wu Cheng-Lung (to be confirmed) from Taiwan. Other dancers include Ben Ajose-Cutting, Iris Athanasiadi, Rosalie Bell, Jean-Gabriel Manolis, Thomas McKeon, Aya Sone, and Olivia Thynne, among others.
Lee Mingwei is also invited to a conversation led by Devika Singh, Curator of International Art at Tate Modern, with assistant curator Tamsin Hong and contemporary dancer Jean-Gabriel Manolis, who has performed in many of Lee’s works. The event will take place on 27th May at 7p.m. in Starr Cinema, as part of its popular ‘Tate Modern Lates’ series of evening exhibitions.
Our Labyrinth was premiered at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum in 2015 and has since been presented at major museums around the world, including the Centre Georges-Pompidou in France in 2017 and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in the United States in 2020, where it was broadcast live. Acquired by Tate in 2020, this incarnation of the performance marks Our Labyrinth’s debut in the UK, and is supported by Taiwan’s Ministry of Culture and Taipei Representative Office in the UK.
Born in 1964 in Puli, Taiwan, Lee holds a BFA from California College of Arts and an MFA in sculpture from Yale University Graduate School of Art. Based in New York and Paris, he is internationally renowned for his participatory artworks, inviting audiences to interact with his performance pieces to explore ideas such as trust, intimacy, and self-awareness. He has exhibited extensively at MOMA, Whitney Museum, Cleveland Museum of Contemporary Art, Museum of Contemporary Art Taipei, and Queensland Art Gallery & Gallery of Modern Art in Australia, and has been invited to participate in major biennials in Venice, Lyon, Taipei, Liverpool, and Whitney.
● Venue: Tate Modern
● Dates: 26 May - 15 June, 10:30-17:30 daily, 27 May - 21:30
● Event: 26 May, 19:00 (free of charge, tickets available from 18:00 onwards)
● Performers: Ben Ajose-Cutting, Iris Athanasiadi, Rosalie Bell, Yen-Ching Lin, Liu I-Ling, Jean-Gabriel Manolis, Thomas McKeon, Aya Sone, Olivia Thynne, and Wu Cheng-Lung. (in alphabetical order by surname)
● For more information, please go to: https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-modern/lee-mingwei
Lee Mingwei
Our Labyrinth, 2015-ongoing (Performance view at Tate Modern, May 2022)
Photos © Tate Photography / Oli Cowling
