The First
Male Pregnancy. Amid cries of joy (and anguish)
around the world, parents Lee Mingwei and Virgil
Wong cross the final gender barrier and make it
possible for men to have babies.
.....................
Lee Mingwei and Virgil Wong
Born in Taipei in 1964 to political dissidents,
Lee Mingwei has a dual Buddhist-Catholic
background. As a child he spent summers at a Chan
(the Chinese ancestor of Zen) monastery where
he learned the simple power of concentrating on
daily activities. Lee then came to live in the
United States and attended a Benedictine high
school in California. He went on to study Textile
Arts at the California College of Arts and Crafts,
earning a BFA in 1993. Lee first began inviting
strangers to dinner while attending graduate school
at Yale University, where he received an MFA in
Sculpture in 1997, concentrating in New Genre
Public Art. While Lee spends much of his time
in New York City, he travels frequently to Rome,
Taipei, and San Francisco where he has close ties
to family and friends. Lee has exhibited his work
at major art venues around the world, including
The Whitney Museum of American Art. His other
solo exhibitions include "The Living Room" (2000)
at Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston; "The
Sleeping Project" (2000) at Lombard/Freid Fine
Arts, New York; and a retrospective, "Lee Mingwei:
1994-1999," at the Cleveland Center for Contemporary
Art.
Virgil Wong has studied at the Rhode Island
School of Design, the Pont-Aven School of Art
in France, and the Institute of Human Anatomy
at the University of Rome Medical School. His
work has been shown around the world, most recently
at the Taipei Museum of Contemporary Art; the
2002 Sundance Film Festival; the Museum of Contemporary
Art in Yucatan, Mexico; the Museum of Image and
Sound in San Paolo, Brazil; and the PaperVeins
Museum of Art in New York City. Wong received
a National Endowment for the Arts grant, and he
was a recipient of the JGS Foundation's arts and
genetics award. His work has appeared in The
New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The New
York Daily News, U.S.News and World Report,
and Yahoo! Internet Life Magazine as well
as other print publications worldwide. He is currently
a graduate faculty member in the MFA media studies
program at The New School University, and he is
head of Web design and development at New York
Presbyterian Hospital and Weill Medical College
of Cornell University. Virgil Wong is best known
for his Internet art that explores themes of human
reproduction and advanced biotechnology. Investigating
questions arising from contemporary medicine,
Wong creates both physical and virtual work embedded
in the traditions of European art and anatomy.
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