Helen Lee

Artist in Residence2022Music compositionPerformanceArchitecture

Dec 20

she/they

Helen Lee | Artist in Residence 2023 | Photo by Kristie Kahns

Helen Lee creates performance resulting from deep investigations into the honoring, understanding and celebrating of life, death, identity, and her ancestral lineage in Korea and Japan. Currently she is exploring dance, storytelling, video, taxidermy, and social practice as tools to dissect trauma, racism, xenophobia, grief, shame, anger and meanings of home to nurture healing. Asked about her process, Helen explains that many of her curiosities “lean to the quiet, the subtle, the senses and the internal shifts within us, around us and in the between spaces out of an intrigue by how these elements can bring connection, disruption and evolution to self, others, truth and nature”. Much of the work Helen creates is from her memories and experiences, and driven by a desire to create a way for others to look at their own memories, sit with them and find acceptance and peace within them.

Open Lab: Helen Lee | Curiosities of Wellness in Bodies of Grief | Photo by Ricardo Adame

The Fellowship Project

As a dancemaker and artist, Helen is curious about the ways she can interact with the audience as part of the dancemaking process and/or performance. She asks, “Are there supportive and safe ways to involve the audience in meaningful ways, both in movement and in verbal dialogue? Our bodies hold a lot of information. I wonder if there is a way to explore meanings of joy and grief not only in words but also in finding access through our bodies.”

Helen continues to return to this passage by Archbishop Desmond Tutu:

"Discovering more joy does not, I'm sorry to say, does not save us from the inevitability of hardship and heartbreak. In fact, we may cry more easily but we will laugh more easily too. Perhaps we are just more alive. Yet as we discover more joy, we can face suffering in a new way that ennobles or elevates rather than embitters us. We have hardship without being hard. We have heartbreak without being broken.”

Helen was initially looking at joy and grief as sitting next to each other, but hadn’t considered them as being intertwined with each other.

In her second year with HCL, Helen will use curiosity to pull apart and lean into joy and grief and find proliferation within them. She will experiment with risk and failure in the process of looking at grief and joy and to find play in the process of not knowing what will be discovered.

She has been building her relationships with dancers, musicians, and other collaborators. The performers, musicians and collaborators come from diverse backgrounds; They are untrained, highly trained, adoptees, raised in immigrant homes, BIPOC, LGBTQIA+, allies. Part of her continual mission is to bring people from all backgrounds together to actively encourage belonging.

Helen is also working with comic book artist, Dabin Han to illustrate her writings about growing up Korean American.

Weaving Cocoons; Colliding Monarchs 2021. In partnership with See Chicago Dance. Features dancers Ysaye Alma, Helen Lee, Sungjae Lee, King Legend, Cristal Sabbagh | Photo Credit: Carl Wiedemann

The Initial Project

During her residency with HCL, Helen curated, hosted, and facilitated Curiosities of Wellness in Bodies of Grief, a three-hour event that included 13 artists across mediums called presented on three different floors where audiences were welcomed to come and go as they wished. It included art therapy, movement therapy, interactive performances, live music (piano, viola, cello), plant medicine, taxidermy, and shared dialogue. It was an experiment and research for her to see how to bring communities together to create safe spaces to be with grief.

In addition, Helen used the residency for incubation and movement research, reworking her writings for a book of stories about the Asian American Pacific Islander experience, and creating choreography with Ajumma Rising, the self-organized Korean and Korean American flash mob group named after the Korean word for a middle-aged woman. These projects built on a participatory performance Helen created titled Weaving Cocoons; Colliding Monarchs, which brought awareness to Black Lives Matter and Asian Hate Crimes.

About the Artist

Helen Lee was born and raised in Chicago to immigrant parents from South Korea. She received her MFA with a focus in Performance and Film from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and BA in Dance with a minor in Theatre from University of Hawaii at Manoa. She has presented works in the US, South Korea, Japan, Germany, Iceland, Finland and Canada. She has been awarded Chicago Artist Coalition's (CAC) SPARK Grant, SAIC’s Graduate Dean Professional Development Award to attend The Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics Convergence hosted by York University, was Chicago Moving Company’s D49 Awardee and Affiliate Artist for Dance Shelter. She was named 2022 Newcity Breakout Artist: Chicago’s Next Generation of Image Makers, was a finalist for 2023 Chicago Dancemakers Forum Lab Artist, had a solo exhibition at CICA Museum in South Korea, a window exhibition at Roots and Culture gallery and has been a recipient for several artist residencies including CAC HATCH, Links Hall Co-MISSION, DanceBridge at Chicago Cultural Center, Butoh Centrum MAMU, Arteles Creative Center, Fish Factory - Creative Centre of Stöðvarfjörður, KuBa: kulturbahnhof, Cel del Nord to name a few. Her performances, works and/or writings have been published in “Emergency INDEX" Volume 8 & 9 by Ugly Duckling Press, CICA Art Now 2019, antirrhinum Issue 2: Hauntings, Quince Magazine, Issue Three: Winter 2020-21 and films have been presented by Chicago Park District’s Chicago OnScreen, New Blood Festival XII and Experimental Dance Virginia.