I'm not Lee Ming (It's OK), 2009
Inkjet print, 40" x 50"
Photo by Ho Ming-Kuei
During the summer of 2008 I received an email message from someone in Taipei named Lee Ming. She (or he) told me that she knew who I was and that she had met me in a dream before I was ever born. She described the dream, which had recurred numerous times throughout her life, as something like a fever dream, always giving her a strange feeling of sadness. In the dream, a cloaked figure saved her life from a band of murderers, but only at the expense of his life. As he lay dying in her arms, he wrote his name in blood on the palm of her hand. It was my name. How she found me after this she didn’t say—only that she saw one of my images on the Internet and immediately recognized it.
In the spring of 2009 I traveled to Taipei and began posting inquiries on the Internet in search of Lee Ming. With help from my assistants, I learned of a nurse at a hospital in Hong Kong who claimed to know the real Lee Ming. She said that he was in permanent psychosis and had a long history of attempting to make artwork out of his delusions and dreams. This first contact failed to supply any further advances (although several interesting drawings were attained), and the nurse indicated that Lee Ming’s family preferred not to be involved in any way with this art project. There were also indications that this may have been a fake message, not the least of which was the fact that the original Lee Ming claimed to come from Taiwan, not Hong Kong.
Through Facebook and other online databases, a series of other Lee Mings came to light, and I interviewed four of them on camera. None of them claimed to be the original.
I also consulted with a fortune-teller and threw divining blocks at a Taoist temple, but found nothing. I had no choice but to cut the investigation where it stood and focus instead on restaging the dream. The second part of the video is thus a dream sequence with a parade of strangers posing as Lee Ming on the mountain. It’s interwoven with a musical performance by a traditional nanguan duo and constructed loosely in the style of a Taiwanese daytime drama. It’s here, in the mountains of Jioufen, that I re-staged my image of Lee Ming’s dream and made peace with the probability that I’d never find Lee Ming.
Introduction to Looking for Lee Ming, 2009
Installation views: Looking for Lee Ming, Kuandu Museum of Fine Arts, Taipei, Taiwan