When art teacher Seexeng Lee talks about his
job, his art, South, or actually pretty much anything, it’s hard not to get caught up in his enthusiasm. Lee graduated
from South in 1994 and taught in the district for 12 years before finally coming back to his alma mater this year.
“Once you’re a tiger, you’ll always be a tiger,”
said Lee. “I feel on cloud nine. I feel like right now nothing could go wrong.”Before he was a South High tiger, Lee was born in Laos in 1975. His family left for Thailand
around 1980, with thousands of other Laotian Hmong who fled after a civil war in Laos ended in the communist group Pathēt
Lao seizing power.
“The only memory I have is when we crossed the Mekong River [which borders Laos and Thailand].
It was a stormy night. There were lots of families. To me it was just a fun trip. But we had to be quiet. My dad organized
boats to pick us up. It was in the rainy season, because there were no soldiers around. We huddled in boats… until
the police picked us up and took us to Ban Vinai [refugee camp]. That's my most vivid memory of Laos,” recounts Lee.
His
family lived in Ban Vinai until 1984, when they immigrated to the United States. “I came to this country not knowing
a word of English, so my teachers had played a very vital role in my development,” said Lee. He cites his teachers,
including those at South, for in part inspiring him to become a teacher himself. But there’s more to the story.
“The one thing that
really did catapult me or push me into the teacher I am today was the fact that there weren’t any teachers that looked
like me, talked like me, knew what I was going through, and then there [were] so many people around me that shared the same
thing I shared, that same struggle,” said Lee. “And so I thought, you know, wouldn’t it be cool if I become
a teacher so that I could be someone who could understand this segment of the student population.”
“I'm the only Hmong teacher teaching a
mainstream course in all seven Minneapolis high schools. I may be the first Hmong art educator in Minnesota,” said Lee,
who said that he has been calling the Minnesota State Department of Education for ten years to confirm this.
Lee attended Augsburg College
and obtained degrees in studio art and secondary education. He did his student teaching in the suburbs before teaching at
Patrick Henry and, now, South. “I didn’t go into teaching to teach anywhere else other than, honestly, Minneapolis,”
he said. “I loved [student teaching], but I felt like a fish out of water.”
“I was really comfortable at Patrick Henry...
Most of my colleagues were shocked when I wanted this spot,” said Lee. The death of art teacher Mark Wald last year
is what he says inspired him to apply for the job. “It’s a huge void. To come into this place, to be in his familiar
surroundings, in his footprint, it has a different feeling. At the same time again, to be in my familiar setting, has a different
feeling,” said Lee.
“It
feels good [to be back in Minneapolis], because I am someone who reflects the students I’m serving,” said Lee.
“Now on a daily basis, you know, seeing that spark in my student’s eye, being about to link ‘point a’
to ‘point b’, I think that’s what most art teachers yearn for, that connection. To see that spark. Those
are the things that [keep] me going.” One thing Lee did when he got back to South was reconnecting with social studies teacher Marlys
Hubbard, who was his art teacher and yearbook adviser when he attended South.
“It made my day,” said Hubbard
of Lee stopping by. “He really appreciated the opportunities we had at South then.” Now that he’s back at South, Lee is full
of plans for the upcoming year. “I want to create some noise. I want to bring back the visual art department to what
it was prior to our beloved teacher having to go through all the struggles that he did,” he said.
Lee believes that there are “inconsistencies” in the visual arts
department caused by the absence and illness of Mark Wald, who died of brain cancer last year, such as substitute teachers
having to teach for long periods of time.
Fellow teacher Denny Sponsler agrees that Wald’s illness caused some problems. “Those
inconsistencies that lasted for a year and a half were unavoidable. But they’re extraordinary circumstances, when there
is life-threatening illness. It’s an anomaly, not a rule,” he said, adding that finding quality long-call substitutes
is difficult because of the low pay and lack of benefits.
But, Sponsler added, there have already been changes. “We’re handling things more
cohesively now, as a department. After Mark got sick, there was no coordinated effort,” he said. “That’s
a huge change that’s already going on.”
Already this year Lee has brought South alum
and film character artist Chris Ayers in to speak to his drawing classes. Ceramics teacher Denny Sponsler has been updating
the arts website, and Lee says that the department is planning more competitions and exhibitions.
“We plan to create a bang this year,
and hopefully the bang is loud enough for everyone to notice. Worst-case scenario, [we] set the foundations for future years,”
said Lee.
Colleague Sponsler is excited about Lee’s additions to the department. “I’m
so happy he’s [here], because he has consistency and the ability to deliver curriculum… I’m so happy sometimes
I could jump up and click my heels if I didn’t know I would fall on the way down.”
Lee is adamant about the
importance of art in education. “It’s 2009. We know that art is critical in young people’s development,
that art is critical in the business world. Nowadays, it’s all about innovation and creativity, and creative thinking,
and all those came directly from the arts. The downside is, nobody cares. They still cut funding. They still see art as an
enrichment, rather than a vital, or core, subject.”
“I heard somewhere that someone said the new MBA… is the MFA-
Master of Fine Arts. Because they want creative people to come up with new ways to solve these world issues that we have.
How do we take the problems that we have and find new ways to solve them? It’s not about business management anymore,
it’s not about how to invest money to protect the future, but it’s about finding creative ways to solve these
issues so we can preserve the future,” he said. In
addition to teaching art, Lee is an artist himself, creating works in mediums including painting and sculpture. His work includes
both personally created and commissioned art. Much of his work deals with Hmong themes and issues.
“I came here not knowing
a word of English. Art has always been a tool for me to survive. That’s something I’ve always done… As
a teacher, I’ve seen the students that I went into teaching for start to not know what it means to be Hmong. And not
just the Hmong students, some of our students, it doesn’t matter what background, they don’t know what it means
to be who they are. They don’t even know what it means to be American… I use art as a vehicle to get my students
and/or the young Hmong generation to see what’s important to them, to see the core values that they should maintain
or preserve, and to understand themselves better.”
Some of Lee’s newest and most fascinating art involves goldleafing,
or guilding, which involves covering a sculpture or painting with thin layers of gold. Lee learned goldleafing in college
from a professor after seeing it in an art book, but abandoned the idea after he learned that it was historically reserved
for the “rich and sacred,” as his teacher put it. “And so I’m like, ‘Rich? I’m not rich!
What is sacred about my culture? Nothing! I want to be American!’” recounts Lee. “I knew how to use [goldleaf]
and everything, but I couldn’t do anything, because there’s nothing rich or sacred about me!”
Lee began using goldleaf
four years ago, after the death of his father. “That void was so great that I didn’t know what to do. And then
I remembered that I painted a portrait of him, back in the old days, black and white. And then I thought, ‘oh my God,
my dad is sacred to me. My culture is rich,’ because we went through the traditional funeral, and I started to see the
sacredness of these rituals. And I’m like, ‘I think that’s what he meant. I have to find something that
is meaningful to me, and I have to find something that is rich, not in terms of the dollar but rich in terms of why it’s
important to me.’ And so I goldleafed my father’s portrait.”
Since then, Lee has investigated his own Hmong
culture to find elements and themes that he sees and worthy of goldleafing. “I want to capture these, and I want to
use goldleaf to highlight, to capture, the sacredness of [them], and use it as a teaching tool for future generations to preserve
or maintain.”
“One
of the things I noticed right away- he has a very exacting aesthetic,” said Sponsler, who traded a sculpture for one
of Lee’s paintings. “Artists do that. They trade pieces if they like something.”
“I
think it’s reflective of his culture and his values,” said former art teacher Hubbard, who has seen some of Lee’s
personal art. “Make sure you say something very nice about him because he deserves it.”
