H e l e n L e e

A loving invitation to sit with anger and loss.

Explore collective healing to shift into ease, groundedness, and joy. Curiosities of Wellness in Bodies of Grief brings together offerings of performances, live music, art therapy, movement therapy, plant medicine, taxidermy, and shared dialogue.

On the 4th, 5th and 8th floor of Mana Contemporary as a part of High Concept Labs Artist in Residency.

Artists include: Anjal Chande, Ain Eccles, Catherine Hepler, Mickey Alice Kwapis, SUNGJAE LEE, Isabella Limosnero, Olula Negre, Peregrine, Scott Rubin, Cristal Sabbagh, Darling Squire, Irene Hsiao, Sharon Udoh

Sunday, July 2

4:30pm Meditation, Movement Therapy, Art Therapy
5:30pm Interactive Performances & Sharings
6:30pm Open Dialogue

More Info HERE

Photos by Ricardo Adame

On travel, transformation and healing. Part 4.

The wars we fight within ourselves.
Black and Asian allyship.

Performed 4 times June 30, 2021 for See Chicago Dance’s Chicago Dance Month, Dance Scavenger Hunt in McKinley Park.

Performers: Ysaye Alma, Helen Lee, Sungjae Lee, King Legend, Cristal Sabbagh.
Volunteer Guide: Rod Sawyer

On travel, transformation and healing. Part 3.

An extension of "BloodyBy Wars" and "Dreaming of Cocoons"

Begins at the top of a staircase to nowhere, nestled in a cocoon. A kimono is cut and torn. Butterfly wings are glued back onto its body. The kimono is sewn back together.

Performed at 3D4D gallery for 90 mins on June 18
An 11 min edited video is at 3D4D for viewing till July 30, 2021.

Edited by Helen Lee
Music by Wild Anima

On transformation and travel. Part 2

Performed for Kirara.An Exhibition in Hokuto, Japan July 17-19 & 23-26, 2020. Performance twice on July 25.

An extension of "BloodyBy Wars", performed in Japan. Symbolizing travel, transformation and history as dress is again mutated, signifying Japan to Korea.

A Japanese butterfly stabs a Korean butterfly.

On transformation and travel. Part 1.

“Are butterflies always symmetrical? Do we value symmetry more than asymmetry?”

Performed at Kotobuki House for Kotobuki Clover Exhibition in Kofu, Japan.

Exhibition June 26-July 3, 2020 with performances June 26, 27 & July 3. Performed several times on each day for 1-4 people. Each performance about 5-10minutes. Performed a total of 9 times. Every performance different and accumulative.

Butterfly Pinning and Dress by Helen Lee
Music by Carl Wiedemann

Histories, they are powerful and they are important; where we came from, where we will travel to. Working through ancestral, family, animal and personal trauma at this an old historic train station was significant. I realize each of us carry histories within us. Some of these histories are ones we’d like to kill, to forget. Does this make us killers or healers? Everyday we live, we move more into life, more towards death. When events of trauma end, are they really dead within us? How do we remove this dead, this dying to heal, rather than suffocate and kill? And how do we honor lights and shadows within us and celebrate ourselves and our ancestors while removing this dead?

At a historic train station, the performance encouraged viewers to travel. Starting at the animal house leading up into the attic, 200 meters of paper guiding the way. Almost everyday for a month, I wrote my family members names in Korean on this paper.

Performed August 2019 at KuBa: kulturbahnhof, an Artist Residency in Germany, 30 minutes.

Materials used: black ink, black paint, paper, tanned mink, mouse taxidermy, record player, shells, needles, dead bird, animal skull, bandaids, plants.

I love you. I kill you. has been presented in 3 various formats: Live Performance, Exhibition and Virtual Performance.

A healing process…get yourself a bandaid The marks we make that cannot be undone. The many questions we have that are often unanswered.  

“The Case For Not Being Born: Life is so bad, so painful, that human beings should stop having children for reasons of compassion." - David Benatar

The Histories of Moms. “All the eggs I will ever carry formed in my ovaries when I was a 4 month old fetus in the womb of my mother. My cellular life as an egg began in the womb of my grandmother. I spent 5 months in my grandmother’s womb and she in turn formed in the womb of her grandmother. I vibrated to the rhythm of my mother’s blood before she was born. This pulse is the thread of blood that runs all the way back through all of the grandmothers to the first mother.” (adapted from Layne Redmond)

I wonder where the first mother was born and what her name was. I wonder how many generations of women we are. My mother never knew when her mom died. She has not been home in 22 years. The last time I saw my grandmother was 35 years ago. 6 months ago I visit her gravesite. When I return home from Korea, I give my mother the date of when her mother died. Relationships with moms are complicated. My relationship with my mom is complicated and her relationship with her mom is complicated and most likely she with her mom and so on and so on. I realize I don’t want this cycle for myself.  

“It’s raining furiously In the morning time, doom In the afternoon, doom In the evening time, doom Oh my goodness, it’s so scary… it’s a skeleton’s head”

Dear Mom,

I think it’s interesting that I call you Mom or Mommy and talk mostly in Korean to you but I talk to Appa mostly in English and never call him Dad or Daddy.  

Everyone says I look like you.  I guess we do look a lot alike. Jenny looks more like Appa.

The other day when I showed you the video of me teaching the skull song to others, you laughed.  At first, my feelings were hurt but now I realize, you were surprised and amused. You must think it’s silly, but I love that song and I love drawing and singing and teaching the song to others.  They seem to enjoy it too. I’m more sentimental than you. I wonder if it’s cultural. I bet it is.

I wish so much that you had a community outside of home, outside of Appa, outside of me and Jenny.  I’m happy you have time with Jayden, Derek and Jordan but I wish you had friends and activities outside of home.  I recall the story when you made radio knobs and another Korean woman was going to teach you English but she never returned your phone calls once you quit that job and started helping Appa at the store.  I wish she returned your phone calls.

Sometimes I want so much for us to understand each other but we don’t really speak the same language.  I wish my Korean was better. Growing up, I could never express the things I went through like when Heidi’s father crumpled up the drawing I drew for her or how I paid a boy $1 to tell me his father told him to no longer play with me.

Finding the video of you dancing at our family grocery store in Lincoln Square was a surprise and delight.  I was 11 and it was Memorial Day. What a very strange day of playing with bunnies, going to Lincoln Park Zoo, hanging out at the store and a painfully awkward, silent and unengaging family dinner in the backyard.  What’s even more odd and surprising is realizing that I got my first period shortly after the video rolls out. You thought I was too young.

Mom...you are so far away… How can I travel to you? What is your original nature? Where is your original home?

사랑해,

Helen

P.S.  I forgive you for ripping up my baby blanket

“Also relatively experienced is Helen Lee, a frequent Bunting performer who takes a similar imagistic approach. But where Bunting is messy and gleeful, Lee is tidy and terrifying in "Watermelon Graveyard." Collaborating with videographer Carl Wiedemann, who also performs, Lee offers an obscure narrative of a coercive, even abusive love affair, of lost babies and lost chances. An opening "exercise" video, with Lee as doll-like mannequin, amuses and horrifies; likewise a sequence of Wiedemann forcing Lee into a chair, amid tragicomic squeaks of protest. When they move to a distant raised stage, a rocking horse incites sexual ecstasy; balloons are, inevitably, popped.” -Laura Molzhan Chicago Tribune

Through the use of video and live performance, Watermelon Graveyard highlights the absurdity of a woman’s role in the 1960s, the fear and loneliness of abusive relationships and the nostalgia of childhood love stories.

Presented at Dance Shelter May 12 & 13, 2016 at Hamlin Park Theater as a D49 Awardee/Affiliate Artist. Produced by Chicago Moving Company. Performed approximately 13 minutes in length.

Direction and Choreography: Helen Lee

Performance: Helen Lee and Carl Wiedemann

Sound Design and Video: Carl Wiedemann

Photos by Matthew Gregory Hollis

“Traveling is a brutality. It forces you to trust strangers and lose sight of all that familiar comfort of home and friends. You are constantly off balance. Nothing is yours except the essential things: air, sleep, dreams, sea, the sky - all things tending towards the eternal or what we imagine of it. . If you wish to travel far and fast, take off all your envies, jealousies, selfishness and fears.”

-Ceasare Pavese

Direction and Choreography: Helen Lee Performers: Ysaÿe Alma, Jamie Corliss, Helen Lee, Alison Slak

In partnership with Indira Johnson, Ten Thousand Ripples and Chicago Park District

Photos by Kristie Kahns

Presented in partnership with Sable Points Lighthouse Keepers Association and Michigan Lighthouse Conservency:

2011 Little Sable Lighthouse, Mears, MI

2012 Big Sable Lighthouse, Ludingtion, MI

2013 White River Lightstation, Whitehall, MI

2014 North Breakwater Lighthouse, Ludingtion, MI

2016 Muskegon South Pierhead, Muskegon, MI

Photos by Kristie Kahns, Connie Colleen Davis, Joshua Thorne