I am the type of hoarder that clings to things both tangible and intangible, collecting random tidbits wherever I go and incessantly documenting my life through photos, videos, and writing. It’s almost a deep unseated fear that if I didn’t, a moment could easily be forgotten, relegated to a past of nonexistence. So as I sat watching people walk all over Lee Mingwei’s Guernica in Sand and disfigure the image, I felt pain for all the hours, blood, sweat, and tears that had been dedicated to the artwork.
Now on its final day at the M+ Museum in West Kowloon, Lee Mingwei’s Guernica in Sand first began in 2006. The large-scale installation and performance project sees the Taiwan-born artist recreate Pablo Picasso’s Guernica (1937) in the medium of sand, later inviting participants to walk across the piece and brush it into a new composition. This process draws inspiration from the Tibetan Buddhist practice of sand mandalas, emphasising impermanence amongst creation and destruction.
For Lee, it is a painful exercise that doesn’t necessarily get easier with each recreation. However, it’s all part of the tension of the piece. “If the work is about just coming to see this, I think the layering and the definition and the meaning of this work would be so much diminished,” Lee tells me. “It [would just be] pretty and that’s it.” And “pretty”, was definitely an understatement.
Installation view of Lee Mingwei: Guernica in Sand, 2025 © Lee Mingwei
Photo: Dan Leung / Courtesy of M+, Hong Kong
When I first arrived at The Studio, I peered into the darkness and saw that the installation spanned the entire length of the room. Bright lights from overhead ricocheted off of the sand, which brought to life scenes of chaos rendered in a palette of terracotta red, yellow, grey, black and white. I spotted Lee in his long flowing clothes chatting with other members of his team. Next to the Guernica in Sand, they were miniscule. I also noticed a curious white rock in the middle of the piece and a matching light that floated diagonally across it.
“[It] is a thinker’s rock,” Lee would later tell me. “For people to rest, to sit…to watch what’s happening around them.” The light, on the other hand, was watching the people, an homage to the eye in the painting. “There’s an eye watching what we’re doing here, so be careful!”
I was first drawn to the project because of the Picasso painting that Lee decided to recreate, Guernica. The timelessness and irony of the destruction of a piece about destruction was not lost upon me. Lee had chosen it after a near-death experience in a sandstorm in Bolivia. At the time, he had been reading a very large book on the painting and when he emerged from his vehicle after the sandstorm, the ideas of Guernica, sand and impermanence just fell into place.
But the world in 2006 was a very different landscape from where we stand today, and when I asked Lee about how his views on his own work had changed, he insisted on not imposing his own interpretations onto others. Instead, he shared a story about an Indian dancer who had walked on his work. To her, it emulated Shiva, the Hindu god of destruction. In that way, the work proved cross-cultural, and solidified for Lee why he could never strictly convey a singular message about his work.
“I don’t have the right to do that,” he explained. “It is an homage to Picasso and Tibetan Buddhist practice, and yet [people] walk away with their own questions and answers and doubts and feelings, and those are as powerful as mine.”
Lee Mingwei and Guernica in Sand, 2025
Photo: Dan Leung / Courtesy of M+, Hong Kong
I had never met an artist who gave as much thought and respect to his audience as himself; if anything it seemed he gave more. But participation and human connection are the essence of Lee’s art and it began for him not as an artist, but as a small child. Growing up in Taiwan, Lee would often visit the soy milk shop, and chat with different people over food. Through that, he learnt about the community in which he lived. He continued this practice during his time at Yale University in New Haven, where he ran a project called the “Dining Process”, cooking free meals for anyone that needed it.
Lee described these “precious” moments as “gift-giving between strangers”, and hoped that they could change people for the better. His outlook reminded me of the Benjamin Zephaniah poem People Will Always Need People. “I’m actually not the most creative person,” Lee admitted to me, which I found hard to believe. “It’s usually the people who participate in my work that help me move to the next work.”
Aside from his audience, Lee also attributed his practice to a teacher he had at the University of Southern California called Suzanne Lacy, an American social practice artist. It was her that had encouraged him to delve deeper into conceptual art, and find himself as an artist. I thought that might entail a lot of self discovery about culture, religion and other aspects that shape a person. But Lee does not find himself to belong to a singular culture or place. He describes himself as a bit of a chameleon—able to adapt quickly and not particularly aligned with one cultural identity—given how he lives across Paris, New York, and Taipei.
Installation view of Lee Mingwei: Guernica in Sand, 2025 © Lee Mingwei
On religion, it is easy to assume that Lee might be Buddhist given the heavy influence in this piece. He did spend a lot of time with Buddhist monks as a child, but he also joked that he went to Catholic school as a child. “I think all the great religions have very similar points about care and love, and about generosity and forgiveness,” he explained. “Since I’m spiritual, but not religious…I see spiritualism in all the work I do, not in an institutional way, but more about how we are as human beings.”
Guernica in Sand does indeed reflect a lot about human nature. Lee told me that how people behaved through the hours would change, with people being less and less careful as the work was transformed into swirls of colour, and as the cubist painting became unrecognisable.
“When we see someone being hurt—let’s say someone kicked someone. ‘Oh, my God, don’t do it!’ But you know, maybe after four, five, or six people have kicked them, you just think, ‘Oh, let me kick them more.’” And this behaviour is definitely reflected in Guernica itself. The town was bombed not just by Spanish nationalists, but the Germans, and the Italians during the Spanish Civil War.
With this idea of bandwagoning destruction in mind, I asked Lee if his view on human nature had grown negative, but it was quite the contrary. He turned to a metaphor and said that “each one of us has [a] pearl in us”, an inner gem that eventually dulls over time, ceasing to catch whatever light may reach it. But it is through those cherished “gift-giving” interactions between people that the pearl shines brighter and brighter, until one day, we can truly see ourselves for the beautiful beings that we are. “Hopefully the world will be a better place when we all are able to do that,” mused Lee. His optimism in the times we live in is rare, which he joked is maintained by limiting his consumption of the New York Times.
When I finally got to walk across Lee’s Guernica a few hours after our conversation, and watch others do the same, I understood why he might think this way. Stepping foot onto the work, it was soft but compact, and I sunk into it with every step. I had impulses to run across the sand, draw circles with my feet, and just lie in it. But I couldn’t do it. I felt watched and it simply felt wrong. So I stepped off the piece, having left my little trail of sunken footprints.
Other people went up one by one and walked like cats, slowly and gingerly. Most of them opted to sit on the thinker’s rock and observe as the artist and his team finished the work. Some people went with their children, holding hands and walking across the work together. They were so careful with every footing that they appeared like children learning to walk. Everyone seemed to be reconnecting with a childlike sense of wonderment, where curiosity trumps destruction.
Lee had a team who would swap over to rebuild the work. At one of the swaps, one of the members straightened his shirt and raised his eyebrows to survey his small work of perfection amongst the destruction. I couldn’t make out if it was a look of frustration or anger, or really anything negative at all, but there was a certain sense of helplessness, of being completely overwhelmed, as if that little swatch was the only thing within his control.
Towards the end of the afternoon, people were definitely more bold with their movements. But even as the piece no longer quite resembled Guernica, nobody seemed intent on destroying it, rather instead “transforming” it, as Lee called it. I watched people pick up handfuls of sand, and trickle the red onto the white, and the yellow onto the grey, creating new lines and patterns. Nobody had tampered with or dare tread anywhere near the new swatch the artist and his team had been working on. It seems without enough detachment, it is too difficult to destroy what someone else has painstakingly created.
I went back to The Studio at the end of the day to take one last look at Lee’s Guernica. It was just as pristine as the original work of rigidity. The colours swirled into each other, the black into the red, the red into the yellow, and the yellow into the grey. They transcended the borders of the original shapes, so that I could no longer see a painting of suffering and destruction, but a mirror for human interaction and pure childlike curiosity.
Editor
Natasha Yao
