Artist-in-Residence: Helen Lee
Helen Lee
Fall 2025
Self Portrait with Bay Laurel and Datura, Japan 2020.
“My work is rooted in a deep investigation of honoring and celebrating life, death, cultural identity and ancestral lineage. I create performances that weave movement, storytelling, video, plant medicine, taxidermy, installation and/or social practice that examine facets of trauma, racism, grief, joy, healing and meanings of home. Many of my curiosities lean towards the subtle, the frenetic, the senses and internal shifts that happen within, around and in between spaces. I am intrigued and driven by how these elements can bring connection, disruption and evolution to self, others, truth and nature.
Currently, I am looking at the inseparability of grief and joy. I continue to return to this passage by Archbishop Desmond Tutu "Discovering more joy does not, I'm sorry to say, does not save us from the inevitability of hardship and heartbreak. In fact, we may cry more easily but we will laugh more easily too. Perhaps we are just more alive. Yet as we discover more joy, we can face suffering in a new way that ennobles or elevates rather than embitters us. We have hardship without being hard. We have heartbreak without being broken.” For a while, I was looking at joy and grief as sitting next to each other but I never thought about it as intertwined. I then realized it is not that dissimilar to winter and summer or light and shadows.
Since 2020, I have lost several people. From tragic accident to illness, from heart attack to suicide. It has been tremendous to sit with and sift through.
I’m interested in the histories of medical procedures, practices, medicines, exercise, beliefs and/or rituals of mental health. I’m curious if there were plant medicines that are associated with the heart, tending to grief or ways to elevate one’s mood.
Thinking of how to re-vision grief and rituals of honoring our grief and honoring the dead. Thinking of how death and funerals were handled in the past and how we handle death and funerals now.”
About the Artist:
Helen Lee (they/she) is a Queer Asian Chicago-born interdisciplinary artist raised by immigrant parents from South Korea. They received an MFA with a focus in Performance and Film from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a BA in Dance with a minor in Theatre from the University of Hawaii at Manoa. They have been teaching yoga, meditation and mindfulness since 2007. That same year, they formed Momentum Sensorium, a project-based company that has created and choreographed in unconventional locations such as lighthouses, train stations, and inside homes. Much of their work focuses on the senses, death, and the entanglement of light/shadow, summer/winter, joy/grief. They have residencies and/or presented works in the US, South Korea, Japan, Germany, Iceland, Finland and Canada. They have been an Artist in Residence at Chicago Artists Coalition, Chicago Cultural Center, Links Hall and High Concept Labs at Mana Contemporary. Helen was selected as a Newcity Breakout Artist in 2022, was a 2024 Chicago Dancemakers Forum Lab Artist and Dance/USA Finalist to Fellowships to Artists. Recently they presented Curiosities of Wellness in Bodies of Grief and Joy at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago.
About the Residency Program: As artistic practice occupies an increasingly pluralistic field, The International Museum of Surgical Science believes that artists are uniquely equipped to extrapolate on Museum collections in innovative ways and introduce novel perspectives to the institutional depiction of medical history. The IMSS Artist Residency Program provides working artists with:
- Access to the Museum’s extensive collections and archive
- Visibility on the Museum’s website and social media channels
- A month-long capstone Solo Exhibition (or equivalent presentation) at the Museum