Our Labyrinth for Grace by Lee Mingwei at Grace Cathedral

Grace Cathedral's 2022 Artist in Residence is the phenomenal New York and Paris-based Lee Mingwei. Lee creates participatory installations, infused with beauty and ritual, where strangers can explore issues of trust, intimacy, and self-awareness. Lee's work has been shown internationally, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, Centre Pompidou in Paris, and Tate Modern in London. In the spring of 2024, the de Young Museum will present a retrospective of his work.

The culmination of his residency will be Our Labyrinth For Grace, an epic twelve-hour performance by three dancers, with introductory music by the Men of the cathedral's Choir of Men and Boys, and a finale by organist Susan Jane Matthews.

Our Labyrinth For Grace was inspired by Lee's visit to a Buddhist temple in Myanmar, where he saw volunteers sweeping the pathways quietly and slowly. It was a gift they were giving to the community, but also to themselves - to be able to perform a ritual of cleansing but also to make a clear path for visitors to walk on.

This is Lee's first project that is traditionally what people understand as a performance. In it, a single dancer appears with a broom and slowly sweeps a pile of rice into labyrinthian patterns for an hour and a half, before the next dancer takes the first's place. Although the dancers sweep the rice with a broom, they are not clearing a path but creating and destroying patterns in the exact moment when each happens. It is a dance of space and time.

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