Lee Mingwei at Perrotin Gallery in Paris: an exhibition exploring connection, gesture, and ritual

In Paris, the Perrotin Gallery invites you to discover the exhibition When Beauty Appears by artist Lee Mingwei, running from April 25 to May 30, 2026. It marks the Taiwanese artist’s second solo show with the gallery and the first in its Paris space. The show brings together seven works created between 1995 and 2025, inviting visitors on a journey of interactive pieces, simple gestures, and experiences to be lived rather than merely observed. An exhibition that doesn’t aim to impose a fixed message through its works, but to raise a question about beauty, our relation to others, and how a visitor chooses, or refuses, to engage with what is offered.

The Lee Mingwei exhibition rests on stark, pared-down forms: a flower, thread, a stone, a table, a chair, a breath. This seemingly simple setup actually builds a carefully crafted whole, with each piece operating through its own mechanism. In La Fleur en chemin (The Moving Garden), visitors may take a flower at the exit, provided they then offer it to a stranger along their journey. In The Mending Project, a worn garment can be repaired with colored threads, following a protocol that turns an everyday act into a moment of encounter and attentiveness. Further on, The Copyist’s Paradox places texts, timeframes, and traditions side by side to probe what copying means—not as strict reproduction, but as a sensitive appropriation of memory.

What ties these works together is a sense of ritual, giving, repair, and an awareness of what passes. This is also evident in 100 Days with Lily, created after the artist’s maternal grandmother’s passing, and in the Breath Drawings and Chaque Souffle une Danse, where breath, alabaster, light, and darkness shape a slow, almost silent experience. Lee Mingwei himself articulates this attention to fragility: "Thoughts and words—perhaps the most ephemeral forms of human activity—have nonetheless endured time, and remain with us today. The very fragility of their form seems to reinforce their presence," he explains. A démarche that runs contrary to overproduction, favoring discreet forms activated by human presence, time, and repetition.

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When Beauty Appears at the Perrotin Gallery offers not so much a sequence of objects as a curated journey through experiences and questions. You’re not facing a spectacular exhibition in the classic sense, but rather a constellation that asks you to slow down, to observe a gesture, to engage with an interaction, or to step back. It is precisely in this space left open to the visitor that one can gauge what Lee Mingwei is trying to provoke, without imposing a single reading.

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