125. VAL LEE: A SPACE BETWEEN MONSTER AND ME.
The Presence of Solitude The Hayward Gallery LONDON.
Val Lee, The Sorrowful Football Team (2025). Courtesy of the artist.
‘I find blind football to be a deeply evocative form of movement. Sighted players blindfold themselves and join fully blind players on the same team, relying on sound to navigate a vast field, running forward without hesitation in the dark. To me, this resonates with something that happens in everyone’s life.’ V.L.
Please can you introduce 'The Presence of Solitude'?
The exhibition can be seen as a visual constellation of performance-based scenarios. One focuses on a fictional blind football team that I formed in Aomori, where we developed movement and listening exercises over two days during a heavy snowstorm. The other centres on an immersive performance in which audiences boarded a minivan and travelled through the mountains together with three masked figures, creating a shared yet solitary experience of movement and landscape.
The sense of implication within the work is fascinating - explored through a juxtaposition of media, which created emotive and physical spaces. Please can you expand upon the sense of implication within your practice?
I think the monster figure in the exhibition is indeed difficult to fully articulate. Its presence is intensely visual, with a vivid color and imposing scale, and when it moves, it carries a palpable weight. It feels as if it is constantly gazing at you, yet you can never meet its eyes. To me, it embodies a kind of existence that requires no explanation, no justification.
The stones arranged on its shelves also resist clear interpretation; one could say they might stand in for anything. Across countless landscapes, it seems to have gathered stones that are almost devoid of meaning and brought them back to its dwelling. Indeed, stones have appeared in many of my exhibitions. This began more than a decade ago in a performance where a performer quietly took several stones out of their pocket. Later, stones appeared again in exhibitions in Mexico City, Yogyakarta, and London. Yet each time, the context, image, and meaning of the stones were entirely different.
In contrast, the blind football team plays with a ball containing bells, which becomes like another kind of stone, moving quietly through the snow. Many times, the ball can barely move in the snow at all; only the force imparted by the player can propel the ball before them into motion.
The sense of sight is particularly pronounced within the exhibition, from the featureless fringed characters, in the images, on film and represented physically. The football team in the snow, the atmosphere with the dimmed lights - all added to the feeling of watching and being watched... Please can you expand upon the focus of sight within your work?
Indeed, in my other works, there are also examples where sight becomes a central concern. For instance, in Charting the Contours of Time, presented in Kyoto, visitors enter a completely dark space and confront intense sound, keeping the body in a constant state of tension. Eventually, they look through night-vision goggles at a life-sized replica of the well-known “Human Shadow Etched in Stone” from Hiroshima, a trace believed to have formed at the moment of the atomic explosion when a person’s silhouette was burned onto the stone surface.
Similarly, in Stereoblind, which took place in the main hall of the Taipei Fine Arts Museum, several performers moved among hundreds of visitors. Their actions resembled performance yet could be mistaken for odd, everyday behaviour, creating a state in which viewers could not easily determine whether the figures before them were performing or simply part of the audience.
I find blind football to be a deeply evocative form of movement. Sighted players blindfold themselves and join fully blind players on the same team, relying on sound to navigate a vast field, running forward without hesitation in the dark. To me, this resonates with something that happens in everyone’s life.
The use of a very specific colour palette within the presentation added to the feeling of saturation, both visually and emotionally. The blue of the sky and ocean and the intensity of the use of orange... Please can you contemplate your use of colour within the works presented?
From the material choices in costume design to filming, and finally to colour grading, each step involved careful discussion. It is difficult to fully explain how we think about colour, but I can say that the monster emerges from the mountains, and its presence needs to feel very strong. In that sense, part of its colour echoes the tones of the mountains, yet another part feels entirely foreign to them.
Leaving the space, I felt as though I was returning, even escaping from a trip - I felt somehow released from an experience which was both physical while also being reliant on the imagination, entranced within the music... the experience has stayed with me - disturbing and exhilarating my thoughts... Please can you expand upon your decision-making regarding the realisation of this work?
I feel that both groups of characters in the exhibition are in constant motion. Even the monster playing music seems to exist in an endless loop. To me, they form a universe charged with intense kinetic energy, yet are presented either in complete stillness or through moving images.
The decision-making process relied heavily on discussions with the Hayward Gallery team. For me, a floor plan alone is not always helpful, but the curator, Yung Ma, would suggest what would work best in terms of bodily perception — for example, choosing between projecting onto plywood or adjusting the height of the projection. The technical team, including Chris Spear, also provided measurements and advice based on the physical space and viewing angles on site. As a result, this work was largely shaped remotely first, then refined through cloud-based discussions, and only finally embedded into the physical space, element by element.
Val Lee, Valley of the Minibus (2025). Photo by Pitzu Liu, courtesy the artist.
Val Lee: The Presence of Solitude, The Hayward Gallery. Until 11 January 2026.
Thank you: Megan Edwards.