L.L. Contemporary is pleased to present “Visiting Friends in Helle,” a solo exhibition by Richard Yu-Tang Lee. This exhibition marks Lee’s first show in Canada, featuring 25 drawings from his latest cartoon series.

The word “Helle” is adapted from the Germanic/Old English word “Hell” to create a personalized term that serves as Lee’s shorthand for intense human crises experienced in life. When the artist uses the term “Helle” in his work, he is not referring to a theoretical place in the afterlife where suffering occurs to the exclusion of all other things. Instead, he names the states of suffering in our lives on earth that coexist with all other aspects of human life. It refers to a unique kind of suffering intermingled with the joy, beauty, and comedy inherent to life.

The title “Visiting Friends in Helle” refers to the experience of seeing a loved one in a state of crisis or being observed by a loved one while in a state of crisis. This series also depicts how it feels when a dear relationship in one’s life mutates into something unrecognizable, or when one’s relationship to the world or the rest of humankind feels incongruous to everyone else’s. Additionally, this series serves as an illustrated allegory for our ability to dip into social media channels and witness the heavily documented extreme suffering of innocent people, and the emotional discord that arises when this is layered over the regular day-to-day chaos, horror, and joy of life.

The conception of the “Visiting Friends in Helle” series coincided on a personal level with Richard Yu-Tang Lee’s move away from his hometown of Chicago in 2020 and the deaths of his grandmothers, great aunt, and uncle. On a global level, this period marked the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, the reinvigoration of open white supremacy in the United States, and the ongoing massacre and forcible relocation of Palestinian people by the United States and Israel, among other conflicts and wars worldwide. This period has thrown the highs and lows of existence into even stronger relief for him, giving way to the intense emotional pitch of these pieces.

The artist has chosen to focus on familiar, beloved cartoon characters who featured heavily in his own childhood and likely played some part in the viewers’ childhoods as well. Because of our shared parasocial relationship with these characters, we empathize with their struggles in a completely uncomplicated way. They lack our constructed real-world conditions for who deserves sympathy, resources, or care, allowing us to feel for them freely and fully. In this way, Lee uses these characters as powerful, universal stand-ins for himself, his loved ones, and those with whom he wishes to express solidarity.

The works selected for this exhibition represent the beginning of a major series within the larger umbrella of Richard Yu-Tang Lee’s visual arts practice. When working in this style, he primarily uses Chinese wolf tail calligraphy brushes acquired during the artist residency in Tao Hua Tan, Anhui, China. Using a Chinese tool to illustrate these characters allows him to explore the gestural commonalities between Chinese calligraphy and American mid-20th-century cartooning. The wolf tail brush was also a favorite of his paternal grandfather, who was a practitioner of Chinese-style painting and calligraphy during his life.

Richard Yu-Tang Lee (b. 1985) is a multidisciplinary artist who makes work about the cooperation of opposites as a way of processing and expressing his life experiences and worldview. Lee was born in Chicago, IL. He received a BA in graphic design at the Illinois Institute of Art and studied figure drawing at the drawing workshop. His first solo show, “I Come in Peace,” at Firecat Projects in Chicago in 2021, led to another in the same year, “Return Stroke,” in his newly adopted city of Portland, ME. In 2022, he was selected to be part of the Springboard Artist Grant through the Maine Arts Commission with the support of the National Endowment for the Arts. In the fall of 2023, Lee was chosen to participate as an artist in residence by the Tao Hua Tan International Artist Residency in Anhui, China. Lee currently lives in Portland, ME, where he paints and co-owns a growing frozen Chinese food business and a performative artistic practice operated with his wife and collaborator, Claire Guyer.