Lee Mingwei’s Ongoing Collaborative Artwork Exploring Peace Comes to the Worcester Art Museum

Worcester, MA – June 3, 2025 – This fall, the Worcester Art Museum (WAM) will present Our Peaceable Kingdom, a collaborative, ongoing project by conceptual artist Lee Mingwei, marking its East Coast debut. Inspired by Lee’s 2018 encounter with Edward Hicks’ The Peaceable Kingdom (c. 1833), a highlight of WAM’s collection, the project features 42 paintings by contemporary artists from around the world that reinterpret Hicks’ iconic work. At the heart of the installation is a question: What is peace? WAM’s presentation will feature three newly commissioned works by Worcester-based artists—Emmanuel Manu Opoku, Kat O’Connor, and Susan Hong-Sammons—further grounding the global project in local perspectives. On view from September 13, 2025, through February 1, 2026, this exhibition marks the first time Our Peaceable Kingdom will be shown alongside the original Hicks painting that inspired its creation.

“At the Worcester Art Museum, we see art as a way to explore enduring questions and conversations across time and place,” said Matthias Waschek, the Worcester Art Museum’s Jean and Myles McDonough Director. “Lee Mingwei’s Our Peaceable Kingdom reflects this beautifully—connecting a 19th-century American folk painting with contemporary voices from around the world, including Worcester. We are honored to bring this project to the Worcester Art Museum, where the concept first took root, and to see how artists and audiences alike reflect on what peace means to them here in this city.”

Born in Taiwan in 1964, Lee is known for creating participatory installations that invite people to engage with concepts of trust, intimacy, and self-awareness. His art often presents open-ended scenarios for everyday interactions that adapt and transform with participant involvement over time. This practice was at the inception of Our Peaceable Kingdom, which Lee first presented in Berlin as a commission for the Gropius Bau in 2020. The artist initially invited a group of 11 artists to reinterpret Hicks’ painting and imagine peace and coexistence through their own perspectives. Then, those artists were each asked to choose other artists to create reinterpretations of their paintings, creating what Lee calls “a family tree of copies, with multiple ‘descendants.’” The project then traveled to the Museum Villa Stuck in Munich (2021) and to the de Young Museum in San Francisco (2024). In each new presentation of the project, the host venue invited a local artist to join the initiative and, in turn, nominate two more contributors, forming an ongoing chain of artistic exchange.

The edition of Hicks’ painting in the Museum’s collection is one of over 60 versions the artist—who was also a Quaker minister—created throughout his lifetime. The painting imagines a world of harmony between people, animals, and nature, portraying Hicks’ vision of peace over time through a utopian scene drawn from the biblical book of Isaiah. Depicting natural enemies such as the lion and ox and wolf and lamb in harmonious coexistence, Hicks connected this theme to American history by including a scene of William Penn’s 1681 treaty with the Indigenous Lenape peoples. Lee describes how he was captivated “not just by the visual harmony of animals and children gathered in a serene landscape, but by the emotional charge beneath it: a fragile tension, a quiet negotiation between beauty, belief, and coexistence.”

“The resonance between Hicks’ Quaker vision of peace and the questions I was asking in my own work felt urgent,” said Lee. “What does peace look like today? Can it be plural, tender, even contradictory? Hicks’ The Peaceable Kingdom offered not a conclusion, but a quiet proposition: that peace is not agreement, but the radical act of coexisting with difference.”

Lee Mingwei invited Opoku to be the contributor to represent Worcester, and Opoku invited O’Connor and Hong-Sammons to each respond both to Hicks original painting and Opoku’s contribution. Opoku’s works often explore identity as it is shaped by time, place, and multicultural experiences, using form, chaos, and juxtaposition to recontextualize objects and highlight their aesthetic and symbolic value. Opoku describes his painting for Our Peaceable Kingdom, as a representation of “the powerful form of liberation…inviting viewers to engage with freedom, as it transcends traditional boundaries.” O’Connor works in watercolor, acrylic, and oil to explore the interplay between realism and abstraction. Her featured painting draws inspiration from other artists as well as Hicks and uses the figure of Mother Earth in the work. Hong-Sammons’ work blends classical realism with expressive brushwork. Her work includes interwoven elements of nature that serve as both the subject and the backdrop and highlights the tender balance between strength and gentleness.

“Lee’s work invites us to think about care, connections, and the everyday ways we can create moments of peace. His work is something we experience and participate in.” said Claire C. Whitner, Director of Curatorial Affairs and the James A. Welu Curator of European Art.  “By reimagining Hicks’ 1833 painting through the eyes of contemporary artists from around the world, this installation becomes a collective meditation on harmony, empathy, and shared humanity,”

The public is invited to celebrate the opening of Our Peaceable Kingdom at a ticketed event on September 12, part of the Museum’s ongoing After Hours series. On October 19, Lee will join the Museum for a public talk about his work. More information, including ticketing details, can be found at worcesterart.org.

The other artists featured in the project include: Abdul Abdullah, Zico Albaiquni, Khadim Ali, Radi Arwinda, Sam Cheng, Claudia Brand, Ambreen Butt, Yuyu Chen, Eunice Cheung Wai Man, Andrea Dezsö, Michael Eade, Emily Fromm, Klaus Geigle, N.S. Harsha, Amy Hill, Hong Kyoung Tack, Hsiao Pei-I, Huang Ko-Wei, Jeng Jundian, Jian Yi-Hong, Jan Sebastian Koch, Philipp Kremer, Marie Lepetit, Fabien Lerat, Sunae Park, Simon Pasieka, Thea Perkins, Esther Rutenfranz, Mathes Schweinberger, Silver Star, Emilio Villalba, Ignasius Dicky Takndare, Eilish Yee Ki Wong, Sandy Wong Shin, Chelsea Ryoko Wong, Wu Ta-Kuang, Yeh Tsai-Wei, Yen Yu-Ting, Ran Zhang, Emmanuel Manu Opoku, Kat O’Connor, and Susan Hong-Sammons.

About Lee Mingwei

Lee received his MFA from Yale University in 1997 and has since showcased his solo exhibitions internationally at venues including the Centre Pompidou, Tate Modern, Gropius Bau, Sydney Modern, Taipei Fine Art Museum, Mori Art Museum, Queensland Gallery of Modern Art, Auckland Art Gallery, Art Museum Ateneum, Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, and M+. He has also been featured in Biennials in Venice, Lyon, Sharjah, Liverpool, Taipei, Sydney, Echigo-Tsumari, Whitney, and the Asia Pacific Triennials. His mid-career survey exhibition, “Lee Mingwei and His Relations: The Art of Participation,” was presented at Mori Art Museum in 2014, traveled to Taipei Fine Arts Museum and Auckland Art Gallery. Lee’s European survey, Lee Mingwei: Li, Gifts, and Rituals, was on view at Gropius Bau in 2020 followed by Museum Villa Stuck. His first US retrospective, Lee Mingwei: Rituals of Care, opened at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco | de Young in 2024. In the coming years, he plans to unveil his projects and new creations in the United Kingdom, Hong Kong, the United States, Sweden, and France.