An Interview with Helen Lee
Aimee Resnick (she/her) - December 1, 2023
Helen Lee is a Chicago-based artist who uses movement, storytelling, video, taxidermy, installation and/or social practice that examine facets of trauma, racism, grief, shame, healing and meanings of home. Lee has presented her work worldwide and received countless awards, including the Chicago Artist Coalition's SPARK Grant, the SAIC Graduate Dean Professional Development Award, and the Chicago Moving Company’s D49 Award. Recently, she was also named a 2022 Newcity Breakout Artist. This week, we sat down to discuss intergenerational memory, our relationship with death, the cycles of life, and overcoming mental health stigma.
NAR: Let’s start with your family. You’ve previously written that your MFA works explore both your “mother's isolation and language barrier” and your “father's relationship to anger and animals.” How do your parents respond to your artwork?
Lee: It's funny you say that, because my parents don't really know what I actually do. I mean, they kind of know, but they don't understand. They wanted me to be a business person, or a lawyer, or a doctor. They weren't really keen on me becoming an artist at all.
When I started graduate school, I didn't know what I was going to actually do there: I just knew that I wanted to go. I had been thinking about it for 14 years and finally decided to go.
I happened to come across an old VHS video of me singing happy birthday to my grandmother in Korea for her 60th birthday party. I was 5 years old and visiting her for the first time. In this video footage, I try to sing Happy Birthday, but I can't get through the whole thing. I basically crumple onto the floor. I rushed into my grandmother's arms in a room full of people trying to get me to finish the song. I can't seem to do it.
My sister ends up singing Happy Birthday and I'm upset about it. So I stood up and said, “that's not the way you sing it!”
While I was trying to find that footage, I found a video of my mom dancing in the grocery store. It was the same day that I got my period. I was 11. It was May 29, 1989, Memorial Day.
The VHS tape starts with my sister and I in the backyard with little wild rabbits. We're playing with these cottontails and then we go to the Lincoln Park Zoo, and then we go to the grocery store, and then we have dinner in our backyard with the bunnies. After the footage runs out, I remember going into my house and I got my period.
It inspired me to examine motherhood in my MFA. I was looking at the cycle of my grandmother, my mom, and me. I shot some new footage of my mom. So my mom knew I was working on a project about her, but she's never actually seen the whole outcome. Last year, I did an interview with my dad: he knows that was part of a project, but he’s also never seen it. Neither of them have seen any finalized art. They just know they're a part of things. I don't really know how they feel about it, because I've never really asked them.
NAR: How do you feel about your parents’ ambiguous relationship with your art?
Lee: It's tricky, because I’m telling part of their story, but it's my story, too. I don't know how exactly I feel about it. I'm still in the process.
I feel like it's important for me to express these parts of my life because I know that other people are struggling. We're not here for a very long time. While we’re here, we should be able to share our stories heal and make living as livable as possible.
NAR: Let’s focus back on your experience as the child of immigrants. Tell me about the two taxidermy animals in your home. What was the significance to the deer and the ram to your family?
Lee: When I was in the second grade, my dad bought them from a restaurant that was closing down. He got these two taxidermy heads and some chairs.
My mom doesn’t love animals, so we didn't have many pets growing up. We would keep animals for a year or less: We had a kitten for a few days, then we had a dog for a month, and then I had short-term hamsters.
When the taxidermy arrived, I treated them like my pet because I knew they weren't going anywhere. I actually named them after the short-term hamsters. There was a brown hamster named Heather Feather and a white hamster named Leather. The deer is brown, and the ram is white so the Hamsters’ names were translated to taxidermy.
They're still in my parents’ home now. It’s a different house, but they're still around.
NAR: Many people deem taxidermy “creepy.” Why do you think people fear the art form? What does taxidermy mean to you?
Lee: I think people fear taxidermy because death is a mystery to us. There's not anyone that has died who can tell us about their experience with death. It's normal to be fearful of death because it's the unknown.
I think of taxidermy as a death ritual. In the Victorian ages, there were elaborate rituals when someone died. Family members would die in the house and their bodies would stay in the house. People would wear black to show they were mourning.
Around World War II, another ritual emerged. So many people were dying and so families were trying to get the bodies home. That's where funeral services emerged and began injecting chemicals to preserve the bodies. It became a business. This commercialism took away our grieving rituals and cultivated a fear of death in America.
People seem to believe now that grieving should be something that we should hurry up and get over. We don’t accept grieving as a process, but grieving is a part of life. It’s not a part of American culture to sit with those feelings, and, for me, taxidermy forces that reflection.
NAR: Contrasting our current attitudes, how would you describe a healthy relationship with death?
Lee: I think that's why I practice taxidermy: I want to have a better understanding. Curiosity is really key to understanding death, especially if you carry a lot of shadows.
Everybody has a certain amount of light and shadows, right? I’m currently figuring out how to lean more into my light. I definitely sit a little bit more in my shadows. When I was younger, I didn't know how to use my shadows to cultivate standing in my light. I felt very overwhelmed by all of that.
Death is cyclical. Our emotions are cyclical. Days are cyclical. To have a healthy relationship with death is to maintain curiosity about our shadows.
NAR: Does death have to be attached to shadows? That is, is death inherently tragic?
Lee: No. Right now, I'm looking at grief and joy and how they're inseparable. It’s like how summer and winter are inseparable.
How can we celebrate life and death? You know, celebrating life is easy: we have baby showers, weddings, graduations, birthdays. But celebrating death is harder: when someone we love leaves, we feel sad, but I think death can be celebrated, too.
There is a timing, right? Death is inevitable. We're all gonna die.
I suppose it goes hand-in-hand with aging. Americans view aging as going downhill. But I'm trying to look at it as entering my second childhood.
Hopefully death will feel complete: my cycle will be complete. But I have no idea. I'm 45 right now. I could live till 90. It makes me feel curious about who I’ll be in my 60s or 70s or 80s. I think those possibilities are something to celebrate.
NAR: Often, your work seems to fixate on cycles like death. For example, your series Blood Blots documents your menstrual cycle through free-bleeding on paper. What do you find comforting about cycles?
Lee: I don't know if comforting is the word. But cycles are in everything. As a yoga teacher, I'm always telling my students that yoga is not linear. There should be no goal of mastering a certain posture or expression. Because once that expression is mastered, there are always more expressions to learn: either a deeper expression or a quieter one. It is also not sustainable to always move into the deepest expression of a pose. Yoga ebbs and flows like our emotions. I think it’s comforting to know that our internal patterns are replicated outside of us. If you look for patterns, then you can translate them across every aspect of life.
I think it's especially important when we’re in our shadows to know that it's not permanent. Our feelings are going to shift again. And I find that comforting.
NAR: How can we better recognize the cycles around us? What cycles are most important to your daily life?
Lee: The moon and sun rotate. That's a cycle that translates into history. We have our ups and downs. We had Obama, right? And then we got Trump. There's always a rise and then a fall.
It's up to the individual how they want to navigate their time here. If you want to believe that everything is upward moving, then that’s how you will navigate the world. But I can't do that while I'm here.
Personally, I look to nature. The seasons and weather are such great teachers. For example, I think people get super bummed out when it rains. But we need rain: the earth is getting replenished. We need moisture to grow.
Similarly, winter is a time for hibernation and reflection. We’re resting. If you’re prone to depression, winter can overwhelm the system. It can bring us into our shadows. But if we can understand ourselves while we’re resting, we can feel a little better. We can know that the light is going to come. I find that comforting.
NAR: Mental health is a common theme in your canon. Recently, you’ve focused on destigmatizing mental health among Korean Americans. Tell us about your relationship with suicide awareness.
Lee: I was stuck in Japan and Korea from February 2020 to November 2020. In Japan, I noticed several billboards and commercials that advertised suicide prevention hotlines and other mental health information. In Korea, they don't want to talk about it. They think that feeling suicidal means there’s something deeply wrong with you. I think it has to do with Korea’s history of devastation and colonial occupation by Japan. It's complicated.
I recently lost a dear cousin to suicide, which sparked my determination to cultivate mental health awareness in Asian cultures, specifically Korean cultures. It's not easy work.
Right now, my work focuses on looking at grief and joy. You can't have one without the other. Having more joy in your life isn’t going to save you from the inevitability of grief. But if you build a larger capacity to experience grief, you’ll create more space in your heart to laugh louder.
NAR: Let’s talk about Deep Cuts, in which you dismantle stories of hate by recontextualizing the archival through collage. I live about an hour from Maggie Long’s home. Can you expand on your connection to her memory?
Lee: Deep Cuts featured 18 Black and Asian lives that were taken. We need to talk about people's stories. We need to educate people. The sad reality is that racism and hate crimes are never going to go away. If we don’t share these stories, we perpetuate silence and stigma.
In researching Maggie’s story, several outlets mentioned that her favorite word was majestic. So every time I use that word, I think about Maggie. I think there are lots of small, simple, and beautiful ways that we can celebrate people's lives.
NAR: Very recently, you hosted Curiosities of Wellness in Bodies of Grief. Tell us about the event.
Lee: It was three hours. During the first hour, I had a movement therapist and an art therapist lead an art-making process. In the second hour, we held interactive dance performances across three different floors. On the first floor, audiences could listen to the piano in one room then travel to another to hear a cellist or a violist. On the second floor, there was a plant herbalist who was making ancestral medicinal bouquets. And then on the top floor was my taxidermist teacher who opened her studio to audiences. The third hour concluded with a shared dialogue.
In the beginning, much of my work looked at the senses and my parents and very individual experiences. Now, I want to look at collective healing. It's good to recognize other people.
We’re going to do a second iteration in December. It’s going to be focused on tending to your grief. It’s going to be held on Sunday, December 17th at High Concept Labs from 5 to 7pm. It will include some of the ajummas from the Ajumma Rising community group along with other dance, movement, and performance artists.
NAR: You mentioned the dance group Ajumma Rising. What is an Ajumma?
Lee: Ajumma is a Korean word for middle-aged, married women with children. We’re reclaiming that word and transforming it. Not every middle aged woman is married with children. We're the new generation of misfit ajummas.
Our costume is inspired by Reply 1988, which is a K-drama with a very 80s style. Every culture has their style of a middle-aged auntie, right?
Please note: this interview has been edited for length and clarity.
