Timothy Hyunsoo Lee maps out Boston with ‘Our Family Portrait’
timothy Hyunsoo lee has always been in awe of museums.
Growing up, he believed they were spaces of “amazing presentations” of history and culture but also felt museums were “intimidating and hostile” and not necessarily reflective of younger audiences.
He kept these impressions in mind when he applied for the Museum of Fine Arts’ annual community Arts Initiative — and while he made a dozen cyanotype prints of different shapes and sizes in varying shades of blue in collaboration with more than 150 school-age children. “our Family portrait,” the resulting project created over the span of nine months, now hangs on the wall of the Edward H. linde Gallery and depicts the different neighborhoods that make up Greater boston while simultaneously representing the kids’ biological and chosen families.
“When students started sharing abstract notions of familyhood, that became the way to connect everything because it became impossible to represent our family portrait as if it’s a singular thing,” lee said in a recent interview with the Globe. “there were so many representations of family present.”
“our Family portrait” is the 19th project to come out of the MFA’s community Arts Initiative, which helps children 6 to 12 understand how art impacts their lives. lee, born in Seoul and raised in new York city, worked with kids from community clubs in a dozen surrounding neighborhoods to create the prints.
He calls himself the “choreographer” of the project: the group began with one idea of familyhood shown in examples of portraiture and sculpture the young artists saw at the museum. then, lee said, the kids decided to expand their definitions of familyhood to encompass ideas of geography and home landscapes.
the borders on the prints convey puzzle-piece storytelling through Kintsugi, the Japanese art of gluing broken pottery pieces back together with gold-tinted lacquer.
“I really wanted to highlight how we are all in different parts of boston, yet we remain connected to the shared experience,” lee said. “Kintsugi became a really great narrative with the idea that we’re not separated, we’re not bound by these borders; that we’re all together.”
He says his exactness as an artist stems from his scientific background and formal education; he holds a bachelor’s degree in biology and studio art from Wesleyan University and spent several years working in a neural stem lab before receiving his master’s in computational art from Goldsmiths, University of london in 2021. Influences from his time in the lab are strewn throughout “our Family portrait,” with diamond-shaped “cells” forming dotted patterns across the visual neighborhoods.
Another of lee’s works, “lotto (sweet child of mine),” is on display as part of the MFA’s “Hallyu! the Korean Wave” exhibit and explores the Korean
American experience and idea of the American Dream. Using the motif of lottery tickets, lee gilded 30 childhood photos onto aluminum plates with gold leaf, scratching out the surface to both reveal and conceal the imagery.
“My works have this larger thematic interest in this idea of invisibility and hypervisibility,” he said.
A boston-based interdisciplinary artist and educator at both the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at tufts University and MIt, lee said he believes teaching and his practice as an artist are intimately tied. He “always learns as much as his students,” he said, adding that he’s a relatively new transplant to the boston area — he’s lived here for 2½ years — and “our Family portrait” has offered a unique and authentic way to engage with the city.
the project is dedicated to all the kids who worked on it, he said, because they made it. “I want them to look at it, have ownership of it, to see the work they create in a museum,” lee said, “and to feel like they belong.”