A Complicated Story: Brown|RISD Dual Degree Capstone Presentation

Calvin Lee
→BFA PNT 25’ + AB in Education Studies

As an over-thinker and a lover of complications, I found that Calvin’s speech touched on something that’s been plaguing me for a while: the value and burden of complexity. I recently heard an artist talk by alum Jessi Reeves, who described leaving RISD feeling “too dumb for art school.” I’ve been feeling a version of that, too, as if I’m just collecting information for a hypothetical someday and not processing any of it. Lately, it feels like the simple stuff, the barebones minimum, is nowhere to be found. This semester, a student passed away, not long after the loss of two students on campus in Spring 2025. In moments like these, when we should be acknowledging loss, allowing ourselves to pause, we are expected to move on at such a rapid pace.

Like Calvin, I feel I’ve been trying, but never quite managing, to unravel the structures around us. The speech’s call to return to simplicity, to prioritize a thing as archaic as duty, felt grounding. Our community sometimes puts too much emphasis on what is our right over what is our duty. Perhaps because we are always trying to protect ourselves from the risks of complexity, always bubbling beneath. We use “rights” as fences of self-preservation: our right to opacity, to only bear certain responsibilities, and to our own energies. Calvin’s speech urges us to choose duty over “rights,” because mutual care is not a right that can be mandated, but a duty we must choose.

—Arete Xu

Hi everyone, I hope everyone had a good lunch. My favorite restaurant nearby is Calientes, and I will miss it a lot. If you have a chance to go before you leave, please go. My name is Calvin Sihyun Lee, and I studied Education Studies and Painting. I’m going to tell a few stories today, ones I’ve already told and will never forget.

Five years ago, my friend Sonia asked me if I’d talk about creative careers for the TEDx event at our high school. I watched that talk again a few weeks ago while talking to my friend Freddie, and I was surprised by how I still thought it was actually really good. I remember the night before the talk, my mom was helping me memorize it, and I got really upset because I just couldn’t do it and even said that I “wanted to die.” A few weeks ago, I presented my honors thesis at the Education Studies thesis presentations. I was up late the night before, trying to cram everything I had written into a 10-minute presentation, whispering it back to myself at nearly 3 AM. After a nearly year-long project, I found myself stuttering and checking for nods of agreement or affirmation every time I tried to explain the confusing reticulations of my project. I was insecure because I knew I didn’t understand my own data. I gave the presentation shyly, unable to really conclude the work I had done. I told a room full of scholars that the conclusion of my years’ worth of research and writing is that my research can be important and that things are complex. But there is a difference between complex and complicated, and I think that difference lies in having the courage to be understood. Five years ago, in high school, I somehow had that courage. So, I hope today I can channel some of that to reintroduce myself after half a decade.

The BeginningWhen I applied for college in 2019 during the pandemic, it was all about what I had and what the colleges had. What I did, what I got, what they offered, what they had. That was what I rode on when I arrived at college. I had gotten in, I deserved to be here, etc. But when that stuff or that high kind of wore off in sophomore year, I slumped, in a way I swore to never. I didn’t know how to face the uncertainty of not knowing what was next.

It’s weird because I loved lockdown and quarantine. It drove me crazy sometimes, but in the absence of choice, the outside, other people, other options, I thrived. I painted like crazy, and tried out all kinds of versions of myself. Freshman year, I was even going by Cal instead of Calvin. I had a shaved head. I was constantly told to dye it. I wore everything I normally wouldn’t. It was somehow the freshman year I wanted; everyone stunted in the same way, forced into the same things, looking for the same out. The rules were easier to break because there were so many of them, dictated so clearly, with stakes so high. Being creative was just being alive through that, and if you went crazy because of it, that was also genius. When school went back to normal, however, I had no idea what to do with myself.

The Unraveling
I was once eating breakfast with my capstone advisor (from RISD), Jonathan Sylvia, who was my first professor at RISD, and I worked as a TA for him for many semesters. We were at Louis. We all ordered the veggie omelet, which, in Providence, always comes with big chunks of broccoli. I think it was in my third or fourth year, but we were talking about an uncertain future, and I remember he said that my future, my goals, my purpose, my dream job, or something, would appear from the gaps of my life. That advice forced me to reckon with what I don’t have and what the world doesn’t have, rather than what it has.

If I look back now on the ways I’ve been taught in college, both at RISD and Brown, negative spaces, distances, holes, ditches, gashes, refusals, repudiations, moratoriums, and other voids and gaps abound. The prefix anti-, or de-, or un- has been ever-present and constant in challenging canons and “traditions,” a word in quotes because it’s been challenged too. In every field I’ve studied, from art to art history, theatre, performance studies, fiction, anthropology, and more, I’ve had to do the thing that’s become so common in college—unlearn before I’d learned anything at all. I’ve been at school at a time when schools engage in their own institutional critiques. Where the role of the student seems to be to unravel but not disentangle the corrupt and rotten systems we’ve applied to and been accepted by, and then accepted the offer of, and then arrived at, and moved into, and lived in.

Maybe nobody knows this feeling better than the fields of painting and education studies. Both have been understood before as pretty linear: post-modernism follows modernism, a person who knows passes off knowledge to someone who doesn’t know. But post-COVID, a wrench was thrown into the linearity of these fields. These fields, without room for the freedom, joy, and access for people like me. This, I think, was the beginning of the unraveling. If painting and education could be bad and harmful, then so could love. So could family. So could faith. If beautiful things are constantly questioned, and the elder experience denied, so could literally anything at all. Complexity, complexity, complexity: neo-, -ism, post-, anti-, -ality, hyphen, etc., everything I was learning felt like an alarmist temperature check for the world I already knew I lived in. I was told to consider everything before I considered what to do and how to do it. Paralysis was intellectual. Non-conclusions were philosophical. Pessimism was pragmatic. And though I think complexity is true and can be beautiful, sometimes things are just complicated.

The Promise
At this moment, I want to introduce a quote I heard at the baccalaureate service last week at Brown’s graduation. It’s from the Bhagavad Gita, which I have a beautiful copy of somewhere, from my favorite bookstore Paper Nautilus. It’s a word of advice from Lord Krishna to Arjuna about being steadfast. It reads, “[B]e steadfast, perform your duty and abandon all attachments to success or failure.”

This may not be my story to tell, but one of my education studies professors, Jin Li, told us a story about cultural interaction in a lecture class about cross-cultural perspectives on child-rearing. She was one of the only professors I honestly shared my recurring stomach pain issues with, and she referred me to her acupuncturist, an offer I never took up. She retold an argument her late husband, who was white, had with her late mother, who was Chinese, when they were briefly living all together in America. While Professor Li was busy with work in the upstairs office, her mother would prepare food all day. If any of you have had the privilege of watching a Chinese mother cook, it is quite the feat—vegetables, knives, bowls, fish, aromatics, and more lie on every surface with a strict logic. It is a production. But her husband, who loved to cook, wanted to make his own food sometimes. So he would use the kitchen too. Professor Li’s mother, in her flow state, constantly moved the husband’s cutting board and vegetables to make space for her own, and he grew frustrated. After a couple of such instances, he was at his limit. He was unable to speak Chinese, and she was unable to speak English, so he called Professor Li downstairs to translate for him and give the mother a piece of his mind. Professor Li, at that moment, made a fatal mistake. She translated word-for-word: “I have the right to cook in my own kitchen.” With no reply, her mother walked upstairs to her room, and it was silent. She later came out of her room, her bags packed, and told Professor Li, who had been standing with her husband in the kitchen, panicking, to translate a few words for her husband: “I cook in this kitchen every day for my daughter and for you. I have always cooked for my family, back home and here. I understand that you have your right to your kitchen, but talking about rights is misplaced in the family. Family is about duty. If you’re talking about your rights, where have my rights been? Don’t I have the right to not be in this kitchen? The only place for rights in a family is in the inheritance! There is only duty!”

My professor’s husband apologized, and the mother stayed. That story, which I hope I’ve done justice retelling in this moment in my own words, is one of the most valuable lessons I’ve learned in class. The reason I love painting and education, though they are two institutions with both incredible potential and histories of harm, is that they are fundamental human practices. From creating beautiful pictures of what we see, to passing down the things we’ve learned, the duty of it all is so concretely and beautifully necessary. To do this ridiculous thing of re-making what you see was always followed by showing, and showing someone to do it, too. And we’ve always known that duty to pass that ability on to others.

[We are] living through a time of “rights” talk. Something that was unequivocally needed by society and culture. Things like anti-racism, decoloniality, and unlearning, etc. have left behind a huge gap. Investigating, learning about, and talking about the bad has not necessarily led to more understanding and more people willing to do the hard work of caring, more love and trust in our communities. I believe it’s a good time to, slowly, re-introduce duty into the picture of the community we want to make. We can forever explain and lament our failures and try to count our successes, but becoming too attached to these things is a paralysis and frustration I’m sure we all know too well. But duty is steadfastness. It is a steadfastness that has no despites, but is an all-encompassing, omniscient state of action. It is a steadfastness that has indifference in humility, and deep care in hope. We balance what we know, what we don’t know, the good, the bad, the simple, the complex, and they exist together, inside of us, and keep us, the person, rolling. Duty is kinetic. It is not petty. It is small when it is done, but huge when it is considered. But small again when it is being done. Which it should always be. Duty is a mountain. But we know mountains can be moved by mustard seeds, and that a mountain is to duty as death is to a feather, and that love is as strong as death. Duty is a life’s work.

What I see now is that people want and need community, friends, and love. People need trust more than truth. Because what is truth when no one has trust? The gaps in my life, my subtractive education—studying painting and education—have left a big hole in the shape of my duty. And after all the undoing that’s been done, even in the complexity of it all, the work is pretty simple. Maybe too simple. Maybe this seems like another flat conclusion, a thing we all already knew, another bow to complexity and existence. But this concept of duty seems like a duh moment. It is duh because, as a concept, it is useless. As a concept, it is just like trying not to worry about worrying too much. But as an action, as a goal, am I willing to do it? I have no job yet, but I am gainfully befriended. I am gainfully impassioned. I am gainfully loved. And I know what my life’s work will be. This moment is a sort of promise to myself, to keep it simple, keep it humble, not to worry, to take it slow. All to perform my duty to take care of the next generation.

Thank you.

Calvin Lee is yelling at seventy-five fifth graders in Flatbush while teaching them about volume.

This is an excerpted version of the speech modified for print. The full speech can be watchedfound at: https://www.behance.net/BRDD_Capstones