A conversation with Kevin Lee
on not staying still; and not knowing
Kevin Lee (TC: 李夢遠) is a Chinese American multi-disciplinary creative whose writing, music, and videography loosely centers around the wonderful confusion of Asian American-ness and the uncertain identity found at the core of third culture experiences. He draws on his experiences growing up in the San Francisco Bay Area and recurring visits to China, as well as broader solo trips later in life, to paint meditative inquiries on the subject of Asian-ness.
His work looks to provoke simple yet profound contemplation and asks questions without looking for answers or fixating. He uses his Chinese name, mngyuan, for his work which means dream far.
Thinking about how you have, you know, you graduated from a computer science degree, and then you worked at Facebook, and then you just decided to quit and do your own thing. I guess I'm just curious about what prompted you to arrive at that decision?
I feel like I figured out what I wanted a while ago, but I didn't figure out creatively what I wanted.
I'm still like that actually, the thing that I'm struggling with right now, is I'm doing a video editing focused project. Part of it's like the project motivates, but part of it is I'm realizing that I want to shoot movies, I want to do filmmaking, because basically, my closest friends in my program right now came from film.
When I figured out what I wanted was that, like, I was working at Facebook. And before that I was in InnoD, right? I was in that design club. I had a pretty clean split of time. Every week, I would have to do something for InnoD, I'd usually do it right before the meeting.
When I was working at Facebook, it demanded a lot out of me. If, I think, I had done better, the thing that we're supposed to be doing, I would have had more time and more balance, but I didn't. And then the balance was kind of shifting towards “I wanted to leave work.” I wanted to get off work to do what I used to do… to do this other thing that wasn't clear what I wanted to do.
I changed mediums a lot. I liked being a photographer, and I liked doing graphic design and type but then I never printed stuff. It's a really confusing thing to do.
I talked to my old intern mentor, and I was like, Oh, I wanted to be a professional photographer for a while. I just remember they had the blanket stares. It’s such a really strange thing to say, I think.
Why did you think it was a strange thing to say?
Most of my co-workers were at their dream job and to be fair, I was technically at my dream job too. I just got there and the reality was different.
At Facebook you go through boot camp as an engineer, so you go through like six to ten weeks of choosing a team, and getting up to speed. And you talk to managers, so you do little interviews with them. And I remember I didn't really know what the fuck I was trying to get out of those conversations, I just remember being in those conversations and being like, well, there's nothing really I want out of this job. So maybe I should just talk to these people about getting more money.
And so, I talked to them about, like, how to grow my career and how to become a manager. And I ultimately didn't care about that either. I just didn't have something to climb towards anymore. You know, I wasn't taking tests anymore. I wasn't acing classes. And I guess the other thing was, I needed to feel like I was still learning. Work really quickly became a grind, and I was learning shit I didn't care about. I guess it makes me a bad employee that I didn't care about planning and communicating and working cross functionally and stuff like that, which is still a little confusing with my kind of design career that I'm on right now. There's still things I know, I don't really care about. Like, creating business value, and even things like extensive user research, I'm like a little eh about.
That struggle of wanting to leave Facebook but not seeing the value in your own creative practice — do you think that is somewhat influenced by your cultural background of being Asian, that obsession with productivity and, you know, money being value?
There's two fun things that I started harping on recently: I think we've talked about, 恭喜發財 “gong xi fa cai”, “fa cai” being “get rich”. It's just so built into the culture that getting rich is a positive thing to happen. And the other one, which I don't know if we've talked about, is 生意好 “sheng yi hao”, the business here is good. But “sheng yi” is like, “life meaning”.
I don't think my parents intentionally. Well, actually, I do think that they intentionally thought about these values and wanted me to be productive and make more than they did and be smarter than they were and for each successive generation to like progress in like this kind of narrow predefined way.
I usually shortcut this conversation – talking to a new therapist at Imperial right now, I just told him: Look, if you have any stereotypical assumptions about Asian American parents, you can pretty much apply them here. Except that my parents have always told me they love me. Which is different from what I see on the internet with memes and stuff.
My parents came to do PhDs in the States. They came because they were academically excellent. It was always assumed that we'd be academically excellent.
And as I got older, as I got more dissatisfied with my job, I looked at a lot more Marxist literature. There's this thing that's kind of stuck with me: if we just changed how productivity was defined, or we just were freed from this idea of having to produce goods and value and services, you could sit around all day and read poetry and cook and it's insane how much there is to life and how much time we spend on working.
I think the other toxic ingredient is America. It's sort of nice being here where people are a little bit more balanced about it. I live with an Italian and he's chill about things. I think that I bring that American overwork culture with me.
How much do you think your family understands what you're doing right now?
Like, very little. I guess out of 10, it would be 3 or 4, and that always kind of feels like a pity number. It's definitely not a 4.
My mom, when we call sometimes I'll be like, Oh, I gotta go. And she's like, by the way, make sure you're gonna program again, she's just slots it in. She's like, I've been waiting to remind you that the value exists in your ability to land a software based job. I think they think that I'm gonna continue to do something, quote, unquote, normal.
And the truth is that, this program doesn't produce a certain kind of person either. So I don't really know what I'm doing either. But I think it's sort of a sunk cost fallacy: you don't derail your life and then go back. Whatever I want to do after this, I want to continue making these insane, risky decisions.
I don't feel like my parents really care. They care about me being happy, maybe. But I also don't feel like it matters if they know now. Two years ago, I think I was a lot more so. It was actually my mom's advice I ended up at the RCA. But, she’s realizing that she was wrong, basically. Just how different it is from what I expected it to be, helps forge a lot of my own path.
I think, something in our parents not fully understanding what we're doing allows us, gives us the freedom as well. Because they don't have a clear definition of what we're doing, we get to tell them. That gives us a lot of freedom, because we get to define ourselves in front of our family.
No, that's totally true. I think about this sometimes. There's so many nepotists in film and music, like Thundercats dad is a Motown drummer or something. There's a ton of this in film, especially director families, like the Coppolas.
I can't imagine growing up in a household where you know, your dad's always playing the drums, your dad's always got a camera or your mom's going to film screenings and then you get to like, 18 or something and you're like I'm gonna study film. Just the amount of pressure I would feel, not just from my parents, but from myself and from other people, too, like, you know, that's Sofia Coppola’s kid, that's why he's making films. It's like Goro Miyazaki. He was a fucking landscaper.
So, You're living in London now. And you have lived in the past year in Thailand and in New York. But you grew up in the Bay Area. How do you think that has influenced your creative path or practice?
I really like traveling. In Japan, there are people falling asleep on subway stations every day. And it's like, wow, people think this is normal. And you go to Thailand, every single piece of food I ordered came with a small bag of chili and a small bag of sugar. And this is normal. It helps you realize that you can really draw inspiration from a lot of different places. The internet breaks down a lot of these walls, but I think a lot of people are still in their places, you know, they're still in their mindset of where they grew up.
And then for me, definitely, I bring the Bay with me. But seeing how, specifically in New York, the design education at Pratt was so road to memorization-y and like, make 12 chairs, don't ask me why. I don't know it just like, What's the fucking phrase? There's like a lot of different ways to skin a cat. It's like really not that nice of an idiom. But that's a little freeing in a way. I think it's terrifying if you have to pick a place to stay, maybe you’ll learn a little too much about it. You just see these different contexts and it helps you challenge things about yourself.
There's something really sterile about design that I don't really like, I mean, people are doing co-design more and that kind of stuff. But when I talk about these things, I think about it a lot more from like, what's the story I want to tell about this place, in a picture–making way, a film–making kind of way.
I think it also helps you appreciate how hard some problems are, that makes it sound demotivating. But you know, it's normal. Anime normalizes sexualizing someone in the middle schoolers uniform, right? And it's just normal. It's so normal that it's a massive cultural export from Japan. And solving that problem is not going to be easy.
Just seeing that, and seeing how people can just walk around in a society that's really broken in a lot of ways is kind of exciting. I mean, maybe I say this because I'm not in America right now. Like when I'm in America, I'm like, wow, this shirts broken, and it's fucked. But I don't know. I like to think there's hope in there too.
You're moving to Taiwan, right? Soonish?
I have the visa, but I don't know if I'm gonna go. There's basically not anymore certainty in my future than there has been for two years.
At least you have made this decision of going through the VISA application process and have had that desire to go there. Do you think it is the idea of being away from home that's exciting?
What’s the dumb phrase... Distance makes the heart grow fonder. I feel like one other thing that traveling has brought me is like, people in my program are like, Oh, Kevin is so chill, love your energy. And I'm like, I'm a Californian, there's like 50 million of us. It's helped me find and identify myself.
When I think about how much time I've spent learning about other people's cultures, it really makes me want to talk about my own more and obviously, being respectful and listening. I feel like it's helped me figure out what parts of where I grew up are valuable to me, what I want to impress on others, and maybe what I don't care so much for.
Being away from home makes it both better. It makes home better because you get to go home. And it's nostalgic. The next time that I go to my home town, it's going to be a big deal, because I haven't been in two years. But at the same time, the world is so big. I'm just a little disappointed that I was one of those people who was in the Bay for 26 years. Wow. Holy shit. I really talked about moving to Japan for five years before I made any concrete moves to get there.
If you hadn’t moved, how would things be for you right now instead?
If I hadn’t moved, I’d still be the most creatively engaged person in my general friend group in the Bay, and I found that super difficult. Right now, I’m with a lot of people who are kinda like, "yeah, why not?" when I have ideas, or they even add onto them.
I guess it’s also what I was saying about different contexts and different problems in different places. I’ve realized what I’m doing might be valuable in different places. Like maybe it won’t make sense to people in London but it will to people in Berlin or something.
Plus, there’s the really practical aspect of moving around constantly and really only bringing like what’s in my head around with me. Honestly, I don't know if I create differently now that I’m in different places, but I do feel like the temporary-ness and the constant moving around has given me more of a free pass. I’m allowing myself to just do something that’s just for the next 6 months, not like a project I’ll put on a bookshelf and look at for like 2 years, which is how things were in Oakland.
What's your current relationship with your creative self? I hear a lot of uncertainty.
I don't know, uncertainty is a great word. I haven't taken pictures really since the pandemic hit. I just did a tiny bit of picture taking for my cohort. I have these medium format rolls of my classmates. It's really the first portraiture I've done since 2020. And I feel like I'm building a weird kind of confidence like I can do all of these things; having not done it for a while and then come back to it and still be decently good at it. But it's also really nerve racking.
When I think about the future, I'm like I can do a bunch of shit, I just need to dive in and be confident about it. But it's really paralyzing because like, I don't know why I haven't done so yet. It's like you don't know why something hasn't worked out until it works out. You know? And then you can reflect on it later. I spent so much time bullshitting my work process, and redefining it, and like this (points to post-it schedule wall) is very not me to be honest. I'm just trying new stuff. And it's just exhausting trying to figure out…
What's not working yet, right?
Yeah. It's like, you don't know what's gonna work until it kind of works, and having the energy to keep trying. It's the reason why I think about filmmaking so much now, I think I've always kind of wanted to do that. But I've always been afraid of it. It's a leap that I've never taken, and that’s I think my issue. Like, I have a crush on someone for a long time, and then not do anything about it.
Coming to terms with sometimes I don't do anything about it, because I didn't want it; and sometimes, I should have done something about it, and I should just go for it when I identify that feeling. And I'm nervous about adding filmmaking to the list of ambitions, because I have a long list of things I've tried, or am trying, and I don't know if it’s gonna work out.
This conversation is making me realize that it's probably a lot easier to pitch myself as an artist, than it is to pitch myself as anything else. Because then I can just randomly not care about this thing anymore. I was really into AI artwork, or whatever. And then I was just like, you know, whatever, I did it, maybe it will be interesting in a few months, but I don’t know.
I very much agree with that. Recently, I’ve been thinking a lot about coming to terms with the indefinition of myself as a creative. I also like calling myself a creative rather than specifically, you know, a graphic designer, or a product designer or whatever. It's nice to allow myself to not be limited. It's also an excuse for me to try more things.
Yeah, exactly. I want to be in Asia, but the things I imagine after graduating — I have all these film friends. While they're still in London, I want to shoot movies with them. So the moment we graduate, I want to be putting together a crew, I should have whatever set up already. I need to write some scripts.
There's things I want to do. And they don't have anything to do with things I've really done in the past. To give yourself the license to just be like, Yeah, we're gonna try shooting movies for a bit. I'm going to try buying and selling used books for a bit. I'm going to run a fucking film lab out of my garage for a bit, I’m just gonna make camera accessories — just random fucking ideas with the fucking around that I've been doing for the last two years. It's really stressful, but also really nice. The stressful part is like, what am I going to tell people? What am I going to tell my mom? But the fun part is coming up with dumb ideas.
I think the other thing that's appealing about filmmaking is the people I've met, these young filmmakers who are just dorks with nothing better to do. And it's incredible. You're all 25, he's got a camera and he’s doing sound and I'll be an actor in this one. It's a cool lifestyle. Those people give themselves the runway to do that. And I'm like, I should maybe do that, too.
Is that a camera in your hand?
Yeah, I just have to fiddle. I can’t sit still.
I thought of another question: you were saying how you thought about like, Oh, what am I going to tell people? Is that discomfort in uncertainty coming from having to in a way prove yourself in front of others, especially your family? Is it better if you don't have to worry about that?
I kind of feel like it's not. Friday night, we went and watched a movie with my friends. and then I stayed over. And then Saturday, we woke up at like 11am and didn't do anything till 1pm. I was like, alright, so today's a lost day. And then today, I woke up late and played fucking League of Legends. Like, why? I feel like, in some part, maybe it's not the right pressure.
One of my tutors said that having to explain to people what the fuck it is you're doing and why it's valuable is what a designer does. And I kind of hated that, because it's super tiring. But it’s also really true, like, actually explaining why you're looking at something or why something should be looked at or what and why it's important. It's such an important skill.
I mean, I agree with that. But I don't know if it applies in a more meta sense. It's important for you to know what exactly you're doing as you're working on a project. But outside of that, like the different things you're doing — I don't know if that needs a concrete definition.
A lot about creativity is about the exploration. So I guess, there's always that level of uncertainty of not exactly knowing what you're doing and then yeah, once you find it then you have this project idea, but before that, there’s always a lot of walking in the dark.
Yeah, that’s a good way to put it — walking in the dark. It just feels like a lot more of a creative lifestyle.
I've been struggling a lot with that recently. Like that uncertainty and the indefinition of things. This conversation is giving me that clarity that, as you've said, it is part of the creative lifestyle to live in that uncertainty.
I just had like a little epiphany: the tutors in my course have been telling me to write down my values, and they're on the wall in front of me here, and just fucking with my camera while we're talking — I was just thinking that I haven't cleared the card on this in a really long time. And, I feel like it's really important to format your SD card.
I don't know how to change it into a Confusious saying, you know, in a nice way you can put on the wall. But in a really practical sense, most of the people I know in film actually do format their cards when they're like, I've copied the files off the shoots, or we're not editing it anymore. It's been released, this card should be wiped; or like, we're done shooting today. I've put it all in the hard drive, we're gonna shoot tomorrow, I'm gonna wipe the card.
I'm carrying all this baggage of what I used to want to do and who I used to be, and I kind of find it ridiculous. I tell people about Facebook still — I started there six years ago, and I left there four years ago.
Trying to be fresh when you come into something I think is super important. I also feel like I wouldn't be as blocked on work. Whenever I'm like, Oh, I've been unproductive. Well, this worked for me in high school. But then this worked for me in college. And then this didn't work for me at Facebook. And then this was good or bad about freelance. You learn a lot from the history, but sometimes you're just carrying it with you as a burden.
I feel like I rambled a lot, but like, hopefully it was useful.
It definitely is.
I don’t know what you're gonna end up doing with it.
Me neither. There's that uncertainty.
I love it.
I'm actually pretty excited about this project though. I feel like we both kind of got something out of this conversation.
I'm really glad to hear that you got something out of it.
I’m always down to like make something, maybe after we both graduate. Do you know where you’re gonna be? You’re gonna stay in New York?
I really don’t know. You've mentioned that you don't know if you're actually going to Taiwan, because you still want to stay in London for a bit and work with your friends in film. I was also thinking about that. There are so many things we want to do.
And because now we also have these options of moving cities as well, it’s just even more options and even more things we want to do. We have these different directions we can go and,
I always think I'm greedy for wanting so many things.
I was in Hong Kong last year, and I was working at this brand agency. I only worked there for two months, but I had the best time of my life. I became super close with all my coworkers, one of my creative directors, she's 40 something and she’s so much fun. And like, I'm best friends with a designer and I miss that place so much. But then I also feel like there's just so many more opportunities in New York, and it aligns better with what I want to be doing. I just want everything.
Yeah, I totally feel you. I fucking loved working at IBM. It was an internship, but then they gave me an offer. And I was like, oh, I should intern somewhere different. And I never regretted that. I think you can find something just as incredible but with that extra piece of magic that you're looking for; or maybe just in a really different way, you know? I think it’s out there.
Yeah. I don’t know. Undercooked rice studio?
Ha! Oh, man.