Two new exhibits just opened at the Frye, each with its own blockbuster element: a 12-foot-high wooden god, an indoor rain shower. But it’s the quieter pieces that leave the greatest impression. At first glance, Susie J. Lee’s Still Lives: Exposure looks to be a simple, striking photo portrait of an elderly woman napping. All that’s visible of “Annie” are the wisps of hair atop her head; she slumps in a chair with her head tucked into her chest, like a bird that’s fallen asleep.

Then Annie starts to move. She takes small, silent breaths, her body rising and falling almost imperceptibly. Exposure is actually one of 13 real-time video portraits of residents of the Washington Care Center in Rainier Valley, which Lee completed as the nursing home’s artist in residence. Each film in the Still Lives series, framed and screened on an LED monitor, shows 30 unbroken minutes of the person sitting for the portrait—something akin to Andy Warhol’s Screen Tests. But while Warhol was fascinated with the fleeting nature of celebrity, Lee’s work captures the ephemerality of life itself. This is as real as it gets: no second takes, no slow motion. Life is passing in high definition. I stood in front of Annie (the lone film on display) for a few minutes, watching her sleep off the pain of dental surgery from the day before, and couldn’t help feeling moved.

“It asks for your time, and if you give it a little, it’ll give you a lot,” said curator Robin Held. The same holds true for Rain Shower, Lee’s immersive digital storm that debuted at the former Lawrimore Project space in 2007, and has been reimagined here for the Seattle artist’s first museum exhibit. Inside a darkened gallery, 512 LED bulbs flicker on the ceiling, sprinkling drops of light on the ground; the sound of bamboo tapping and drums-as-thunder complete the virtual experience. It’s a space for meditation, and ironically, a way to escape the dreariness of the nonstop winter showers outside.

In the back of the Frye is Li Chen’s Eternity and Commoner. For his first U.S. museum exhibit, the Taiwanese sculptor transitions from monumental bronze Buddhas to more fragile, figurative bodies made of clay, rope, and wood. He regards his sculptures as living bodies, keeping them alive by moistening the clay over the wooden skeletons. When the clay dries—exposing the "bones"—the life passes from the body. Through a translator, Li Chen emphasized how “very, very fragile” his pieces are, as fragile as a single breath, even the exhibit’s centerpiece: a towering 12-foot-high wooden “modern god” surrounded by its entourage. Despite the sheer size of this piece, dubbed Eternity, it’s little more a hollow figure, said Frye director Jo-Anne Birnie Danzker. “If you strip away the symbols of power and wealth, all that’s left is the skeleton.”

Li Chen: Eternity and Commoner
Thru Apr 8

Susie J. Lee: Of Breath and Rain
Thru Apr 15