Can Time Heal Anything?

What lingers in your heart after a loved one is lost? And what can this teach us about the ephemerality of life?

In his work The Letter Writing Project, part of the Rubin’s exhibition Measure Your Existence, artist Lee Mingwei invites visitors to pen a letter to a lost or absent loved one. The cathartic act of writing the unsaid is twofold, as other museum visitors can choose to read the unsealed letters left at the installation. To further explore the mechanics of grief, Lee takes the Brainwave stage with Dr. Lila Davachi to discuss the physical and mental experience of our own impermanence.

About the Speakers

Born in Taiwan in 1964 and currently living in New York and Paris, Lee Mingwei creates participatory installations, where strangers explore issues of trust, intimacy, and self-awareness, and one-on-one events in which visitors contemplate these issues with the artist through eating, sleeping, walking, and conversation. Lee’s projects are often open-ended scenarios for everyday interaction and take on different forms and change with the involvement of participants during the course of an exhibition. Lee received an MFA from Yale University in 1997, and he has held solo exhibitions internationally, including at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Queensland Gallery of Modern Art, Mori Art Museum, and Centre Pompidou. He has been featured in biennials in Venice, Lyon, Liverpool, Taipei, Sharjah, Sydney, and the Whitney Museum, as well as Asia Pacific Triennials.

Dr. Lila Davachi is Professor of Psychology and Neural Science and the Director of the Center for Learning, Memory, and Emotion at New York University. She received her BA in psychology from Barnard College, her PhD in neurobiology from Yale University, and conducted postdoctoral research at MIT. Her work has focused on the psychological and brain mechanisms that underlie our ability to form, consolidate, and later retrieve memories. Her scientific approach relies both on uncovering new aspects of human memory and further understanding those functions using different forms of brain imaging, including fMRI and electrophysiology. Her work is internationally known and she was recognized with the prestigious Young Investigator Award from the Cognitive Neuroscience Society in 2009. She has published several influential papers in top-tiered journals. This is her third appearance at the Rubin.

Lead support for Brainwave is provided by Science Sandbox, an initiative of Simons Foundation, and by the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council.

Major support is provided by Gerry Ohrstrom, Rasika and Girish Reddy, and Noah P. Dorsky.

Program support is provided by Eileen Caulfield Schwab, Eva and Yoel Haller, Cheryl Henson, and Heather Beth Henson.