Chicago Illinois 60603
United States
The School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) welcomes Lee Mingwei as the 2025–26 Bill and Stephanie Sick Distinguished Visiting Professor.
Born in Taiwan and currently living in Paris, New York, and Taipei, Lee creates participatory installations where strangers can explore issues of trust, intimacy, and self-awareness and one-on-one events, in which visitors contemplate these issues with the artist through eating, sleeping, walking, and conversation. Lee’s projects are often open-ended scenarios for everyday interaction and take on different forms with participants' involvement and change during an exhibition. He has held solo exhibitions internationally, including Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco | de Young; Tate Modern, London; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Gropius Bau, Berlin; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art, and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; M+, Hong Kong; Mori Art Museum, Japan; and Taipei Fine Arts Museum, and he has been featured in biennales in Venice, Lyon, Liverpool, Taipei, Shanghai, Sharjah, Sydney, the Whitney Museum, and Asia Pacific Triennials.
As SAIC’s 2025–26 Bill and Stephanie Sick Distinguished Visiting Professor, Lee will present a free public lecture through SAIC’s Visiting Artists Program on October 21 at 6pm CT in Fullerton Hall at the Art Institute of Chicago. Details may be found by visiting saic.edu/vap. In the spring, Lee will be engaged with the course Encounters with the Past taught by Vanessa Damilola Macaulay, assistant professor in the Department of Performance. This course invites graduate students to activate and transform archival traces through sustained studio practice. Archival gestures may become scores for improvisation, silences can become performative landscapes, and fragments can be disrupted, reassembled, or reimagined.
Established in 2006 by a generous gift from Bill and Stephanie Sick of Winnetka, Illinois, the Bill and Stephanie Sick Distinguished Visiting Professorship enables internationally renowned artists and designers to visit and teach at SAIC. Previous Bill and Stephanie Sick Distinguished Visiting Professors include Bruce Mau, Jaume Plensa, Bill Fontana, Catherine Opie, Andrea Zittel, Theaster Gates, Chris Ware, Ann Hamilton, Laura Owens, Amanda Williams, Nayland Blake, Ebony G. Patterson, Shirin Neshat, Walter Hood, Raven Chacon, and most recently, Fatimah Tuggar.
About the School of the Art Institute of Chicago
For nearly 160 years, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) has been a leader in educating the world’s most influential artists, designers, and scholars. Located in downtown Chicago with a fine arts graduate program ranked number two in the nation by US News and World Report, SAIC provides an interdisciplinary approach to art and design as well as world-class resources, including the Art Institute of Chicago museum, on-campus galleries, and state-of-the-art facilities. SAIC’s undergraduate, graduate, and post-baccalaureate students have the freedom to take risks and create the bold ideas that transform Chicago and the world, and adults, teens, and kids in our Continuing Studies classes have the opportunity to explore their creative sides, build portfolios, and advance their skills. Notable alumni and faculty include Georgia O’Keeffe, Nick Cave, David Sedaris, Cynthia Rowley, Michelle Grabner, Richard Hunt, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, and Jeff Koons.
