Lee Mingwei - The Moving Garden - NGV International

Tens of thousands of flowers will be gifted between strangers when Taiwanese-American artist Lee Mingwei invites strangers to his participation piece this summer. The NGV presents his acclaimed piece The Moving Garden 2009-present, an artwork that will create new and unexpected encounters in the city. 

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Lee’s artwork is highly participatory, and invites audiences into one-on-one interactions, such as bringing in an item to be mended by the artist in The Mending Project as well as more open-ended works such as The Moving Garden. Lee says of the work: ‘In this project I present a space with beautiful, fresh flowers.

Visitors are invited to take one of these flowers with them when they leave the gallery, if they will agree to do two things: first, to make a detour from their intended route when leaving the museum for their next destination; second, along this detour, to give the flower to a stranger who they feel would benefit from this unexpected act of generosity.’ 

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Lee received an MFA from Yale University in 1997, and has recently held solo exhibitions at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Taipei Fine Arts Museum, and Mori Art Museum. Melbourne florist Flowers Vasette will partner with the NGV and provide 1,00 fresh flowers for each of the 106 days of the exhibition totalling 106,000 flowers.

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LEE MINGWEI: THE MOVING GARDEN will be on display from the 15th of October 2016 to the 29th of January 2017 at the NGV International near the Waterwall at Ground Level. More info, go to the NGV site here.

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