The Art of Mending and Mending as Participatory Art: Lee Mingwei and His Relations @ The Taipei Fine Arts Museum |

A man is sitting at a long table mending a garment that belongs to a person facing him. It looks like an intimate scene of the kind you may glimpse in a house or in a small repair shop. Yet, if you observe things a bit better, you realise the scene is taking place in a different environment: the two persons are indeed sitting in a gallery or museum space and, behind the mender, hundreds of cone-shaped spools of coloured thread are applied to the wall forming a mesmerising installation.

This is "The Mending Project", an interactive conceptual work by Taiwanese artist Lee Mingwei.

The seeds of this project were actually sown after 9/11 when the artist used mending to react to a negative experience and transform it into something positive by developing a sort of intimacy with strangers and create in this way a network of friendships.

As the years passed, the project developed further with gallery visitors bringing damaged textile articles, choosing the colour of thread and watching Mingwei mending the article.

Once this phase is finished, the item is placed on the table along previously mended items, but with threads still attached. Owners can reclaim the items at the end of the exhibition, when Mingwei cuts the thread and everything suddenly unravels.

According to the artist, the act of mending has got an emotional value: people bring indeed to him favourite damaged items (in one case somebody took a very symbolic heart to mend…), and the mending – carried out in vibrant threads – is not done to hide the damage as the artist admits he is not a good mender at all, but to celebrate the repair.

This progressive and poetic project is currently part of the "Lee Mingwei and His Relations: The Art of Participation" event organised by the Taipei Fine Arts Museum and the Mori Art Museum in Japan.

The exhibition actually features fifteen major works (including new work) spanning the twenty-year career of this artist born in Taichung, Taiwan, in 1964, and based in New York. Most of the works included could actually be defined as participatory projects.

Mingwei was awarded a Master of Fine Arts in Sculpture from Yale University, and also studied textile art at the California College of Art, but he rarely works with these mediums, preferring to create projects that connect with and engage visitors, prompting them to share their emotions with the artist.

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.

Among the others included at the Taipei Museum there are also "The Dining Project", a conversation occurring in the context of presentation and eating of food, and "The Letter Writing Project", in which the artist encourages visitors to write letters to people they wish they had written to but haven't.

In "The Sleeping Project" the artist shares instead an evening in the museum with a visitor, a revealing experience that was inspired to a trip from Paris to Prague on a night train, where the artist met an elderly lady who told him stories about surviving in a concentration camp.

Quite a few of these participatory installations have a cathartic quality about them: while working on "The Mending Project", for example, Mingwei found himself repairing garments and items belonging to different generations of visitors from the same family, symbolically uniting them through a textile project, and strengthening in this way the thread that binds humanity together.