2023 McKnight Visual Arts Fellow: Sieng Lee

Banner image: Becoming American, 2014. Installation at the White Bear Center for the Arts. Photo by Paul Dols for Press Publications.

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This is the sixth in a series of articles profiling the six distinguished artists chosen as 2023 McKnight Fellows in Visual Arts, a grant program for mid-career artists in Minnesota that is administered by the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. The 2023 cohort includes Tia-Simone Gardner, Kaamil A. Haider, Keren Kroul, Sieng Lee, Mark Ostapchuk, and Lindsay Rhyner.

Their two-year fellowship will culminate this spring with a McKnight Discussion Series:

Thursday, March 27, 2025: Adriel Luis (curator and artist) in conversation with Kaamil A. Haider, Keren Kroul, and Mark Ostapchuk

Thursday, April 10, 2025: Katie Pfohl (Associate Curator of Contemporary Art, Detroit Institute of Art) in conversation with Tia-Simone Gardner, Sieng Lee, and Lindsay Rhyner

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Photo by Rik Sferra, courtesy of MCAD.

 

There’s this expectation we have that everybody loves Christmas, but it just isn’t true. We allow for a small cast of holiday heels — our Grinches, our Scrooges, our James Caan in Elf — on the condition that they eventually come around to the Christmas spirit in the end. Not Sieng Lee. He and I meet up in the Northern Starz Center for Performing Arts scene shop in Ramsey, where, with the help of the theater’s co-founder, artistic director, and resident carpenter Kyle Frederickson, Lee oversees the construction of his large-scale sculptural installations. Amid all the clutter of scenery and signage, tucked away in a corner behind the tablesaw, stands a pair of mannequin legs wearing blue jeans and brown loafers. They are all that remain of one of Lee's older sculptures — part of Becoming American, the body of work Lee presented in the 2014/2015 Jerome Fellowship Exhibition — in which the legs hung limp from inside a Christmas tree made of folded silver and gold paper. In the work, it’s hard to discern whether the figure is hiding, hanging, or has been halfway eaten by the holiday itself, but you can tell it’s not good.

“I made that one was when I returned back from Christmas to my studio in my MFA studio at MCAD,” he says. “I was just like, I'm so sick and tired of the holidays. I'm tired of it because even for my family, we only knew Christmas because you got gifts from the Salvation Army. Christmas isn't something that we celebrated, but it's something that was a part of the mainstream American culture. I was so frustrated.”

He put that frustration into action in his studio and started folding up joss paper, the traditional Chinese paper printed with silver, copper, and gold that is meant to be folded and burned as an offering of spirit money to one’s ancestors. Soon a bright, shiny Christmas tree constructed out of Lee’s Hmong heritage took shape. Then, he says, “I just hung the legs on it, and that was kind of the final statement. You feel the dread of this whole experience.”

 

Becoming American, 2013. Found objects and joss paper. Images courtesy of the artist.

 

There is no small amount of humor in the piece, as well; like the artist himself, the work is dryly funny and refreshingly frank. No surprise then that Lee describes many of his sculptures as self-portraits. The legs have been a recurring theme, appearing more than once in his Becoming American series, and always in relation to folded spirit money: legs drooping down from inside a tree, or peeking out like the Wicked Witch of the East from under a folded paper avalanche, or diving headlong into a pile of shiny joss paper that shoots out like a chipper shredder into a massive spray of gold, silver, white, and red. The legs are always clad the same, just as they are in the corner of the woodshop, in that pair of jeans and comfy slip-ons.

“I wanted to bring a part of myself into my work, bringing my cultural identity and then literally bringing my shoes and my jeans,” he says. There is a visual tension between the two, but for Lee, they amount to a complete picture. “Being Hmong is also being American, so I don’t separate the two. It is who I am as an identity.”

 

Season Two Episode 5: Bring the Pain, 2014. Image courtesy of MCAD.

 

Born in a refugee camp in Thailand, Lee emigrated to Wisconsin with his family in 1991 at the age of 3. After growing up and earning a degree in graphic design, Lee developed an interest in pushing for something more personal, more difficult. “I looked at sculptural installation as a means to get me uncomfortable, away from my computer, away from design-based work.”

Interestingly, the literal portions of these self-portraits almost always seem to take the form of legs — never pictures of his own face, despite Lee’s background in drawing and design. The casual Western garb is obviously at odds with the intricately folded joss paper, but there are deeper levels of significance, as well. “I’m always reminded of the stories of being in the refugee camp,” he explains. “When I was in the camp, we were barefoot. Other than your face, that was always the most naked part of who you are.”

It’s a particular mix of cruelty and benevolence that none of us can remember our earliest years. They become, in a way, other people’s stories. An inheritance you lived through, same as with your family’s and community’s larger cultural traditions: they belong to you, but not completely. Using your own memories as fodder for your art is one thing, but introducing one’s cultural and religious practices to an art gallery audience can be an incredibly vulnerable act — not in searching for the viewers’ approval but for your community’s. As Lee leaned into this series of sculptures bringing folded spirit money into a contemporary art context, he worried he might be crossing a line.

“When I first started doing some of this work, I was very fearful of not just my community, but also, because our religion is Animism, I’m very fearful of even the spirits of my ancestors,” he says. “What would they think? Is this wrong? To use our objects and artifacts within our community and within our religious practices for some way? I even burned incense in the gallery and had to say, sorry, I'm going to break these norms and do this. This is not disrespect.”

You can tell this is no cynical lark simply by the sheer amount of work he puts into these pieces, folding these little paper boats by the hundreds, sometimes thousands, for every sculpture and then burning them all after each exhibition — starting anew every time. “There are sessions where I would fold for maybe eight hours straight, something like that,” Lee recalls. “And I even did a 12 hour installation, just doing that.”

 

Top: Screenshot of video by Mia of Sieng Lee installing Siv Yis and His Wooden Horses. Bottom: Lee installing his contribution to the White Bear Center for the Arts exhibition Minnesota Pandemic Remembrance, 2020. Lee’s installation featured 2,500 disposable medical masks, one for each COVID related death in Minnesota at the time of the installation. Photo courtesy White Bear Center for the Arts via Pioneer Press.

 

There’s value and meaning in that labor alone, and at times he has invited his friends and family to join in the work, though he’s very candid about this work not being for them. “I think about audience a lot,” he says. “I’m always very frank that my work is for white people. White people, meaning your general museum attendee, your gallery attendee. But my impact is not delivering that work directly to my community; that impact is just representation for my community in that work.”

When I ask what he hopes those white audiences, those wider audiences, will take away from his installations, he’s delightfully blunt. “I don’t really want them to take anything away from it. I think it’s just me, and that’s all there is to it.” A true self-portraitist, looking to be seen on his own terms and with his own sense of aesthetics. “I’m not here to give you guys a history lesson about my people.”

We carry our histories with us, though, and at least one of Lee’s installations can’t help but teach us something. His 2019 MAEP exhibition, Siv Yis and His Wooden Horses, presents a sculptural encapsulation of the stories Lee grew up hearing about the father of Hmong shamanism. Lee considers the show a collaboration with his uncle, himself a shaman who told Lee the legends that informed the work. The story goes that Siv Yis (pronounced “Shee Yee”) descended from the heavens to travel the earth healing people of their sicknesses. After his own son was taken by death, Siv Yis decided to return to the heavens and leave his healing powers behind in the hands of human shamans. The installation is fittingly spartan, opening with a massive wall of several thousand joss paper boats and devoting the entire second gallery to fourteen wooden benches, simple as sawhorses, floating up to the ceiling in a physical embodiment of the modesty and majesty of shamanistic trance states.

 

Siv Yis and His Wooden Horses, 2019. Installation views of Lee's MAEP Exhibition at Mia. Photos courtesy of the artist.

 

At the entrance, the silver and gold paper boats shimmer like the scales of some minimalist dragon. Removed from the more narrative applications of earlier works, the impact of the folded papers has been boiled down to their formal elements: a full wall of color, texture, and labor. With this simplicity, these spiritual and cultural artifacts suddenly insert themselves more forcefully into conversation with the work of other contemporary sculptors — Tara Donovan’s stacked drinking straws and cubes of toothpicks come to mind, as does Doris Salcedo’s monumental pile of chairs and Do Ho Suh's sculpture of armor made out of military dogtags. In the larger adjoining gallery, fourteen wooden tables progressively take flight, lifting haphazardly up from the floor in a way that hints at the playfulness of many of Mauricio Catellan’s sculptures, the quiet reverence of Martin Puryear’s Ladder for Booker T. Washington, and the somber strangeness of Cai Guo-Qiang’s taxidermied wolfpack careening through the air. Lee left his legs out of this exhibition — look to Robert Gober for a great dialogue about identity between those works — instead choosing to focus less on himself specifically and more on the Hmong traditions that formed him.

The boiling down evident in his MAEP exhibition has clearly continued, as Lee tells me — in deliberately vague terms — about his plans for future work. The legs will likely come back, but he wonders what will happen when the other cultural signifiers go away. “I have a very strong visual language,” he says, “but now what I want to do is to devoid myself of that visual language, meaning what happens to my work if I'm not using joss paper, if I'm not using these objects and artifacts that relate directly to my community? Does that still make me a Hmong-American artist? Does that make me an American artist?”

What he has in mind is to lean into minimalist aesthetics, stripping back his installations to be even simpler. Lee is an artist who values evolution — not just in his studio practice but in the way he sees his cultural practices changing over time, as well. “Shamanism’s changed, of course,” he says. “It should change. Everything changes. Nothing should remain the same.”

“What's authentic to my community?” he continues. “Is there even such a thing? Especially around religion, we're scared that we might not be doing it correctly. And as I'm doing some of this work and as I actually talk to some of our shamans, I get to realize that they just think it's cool. They don't see it as disrespect.”

 

Becoming American, 2014. Installation at the White Bear Center for the Arts. Photo courtesy of the artist.

 

Communication is at the heart of all of Lee’s work: “I believe in simplicity. You don't have to overcomplicate; it's just messaging.” For him, that is true not just in the gallery but in the real world as well, where he has been an active political organizer for over a decade. Having spent years helping run successful campaigns for Hmong-American state legislators, Lee has now taken a job as the National Field Director of Asian and Pacific Islander American Vote (APIAVote), a nonprofit working to build access and engagement around voting among Asian American and Pacific Islander communities all over the country.

Having an audience-facing practice is what prepared him for this work. “Artists are so good at listening and engaging community, but they don't see themselves in these fields that they actually are really good in. I think there's so much that artists can do, but we limit ourselves. I’m always going to come in from an artist lens, and not just art as in making, but the way that I engage with people.”

Between doing that work and raising two young sons with his wife, Lee’s schedule has not allowed for quite as many installations in recent years. He is ruminating on new work, though, especially in light of his new position, coming to grips not just with being Hmong in Minnesota but through the lens of being Asian in America. He is also eager to keep questioning where he fits within the larger cultural continuum — in the ecosystems of art, community, and advocacy alike. “I always believe my work sets up for the next person,” he says. “Especially in art, right?”

For now, the pot is on the stove, and the water is going to keep boiling, hopefully getting Lee closer and closer to simplicity in his forms and clarity in his messaging. Either way, the only constant is change. Like old traditions that have survived to the present — whether burning golden paper or mounting a Douglas fir in your living room — evolution is inevitable. Through conflict, consideration, and, more than anything, doing the damn thing for eight hours straight over and over and over again, a good self portrait will inevitably change along with you. ◼︎ 

 

Installation view of 2014/15 Jerome Fellowship Exhibition. Photo courtesy of the artist.

To learn more about Sieng Lee and access a link to his portfolio, visit his profile at MCAD.