JANE
LEE
GALLERY M I SS I O N Established in 2000, Sundaram Tagore Gallery is devoted to examining the exchange of ideas between Western and non-Western cultures. We focus on developing exhibitions and hosting not-for-profit events that encourage spiritual, social and aesthetic dialogues. In a world where communication is instant and cultures are colliding and melding as never before, our goal is to provide venues for art that transcend boundaries of all sorts. With alliances across the globe, our interest in cross-cultural exchange extends beyond the visual arts into many other disciplines, including poetry, literature, performance art, film and music.
JANE LEE: RECENT PAINTINGS
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t would be possible to see Jane Lee’s Turned Out II as a riposte to the target paintings of Johns and Noland that are still enshrined at MoMA as modernist icons, fifty years after their making. What was crucial about Noland’s and Johns’ works was their directness and the manner of their making—encaustic, acrylic. So it is with Jane Lee. It is what it is: a long strip of canvas part painted red rolled into a large, but tight spool, loosened at the bottom. If Johns and Noland had emphasised their paintings’ status as object, Lee has gone much further: seen in a different context it would be easily designated a sculpture, or fabric. Moreover, the implicit metaphor is different—not of shooting but of repairing, for thread on a spool is for sewing or suturing—and one could alternatively see it as a bandage. Also as the red darkens at the centre the image could be read as a woman’s breast. Likewise, Beneath I (page 29) may look like deconstruction. It would be all too easy to relate it to the deconstructed paintings of Angela de la Cruz or Steve Parrino, but it is actually very different: Opposite: Turned Out II, 2010, acrylic paint on canvas, 59 x 53.2 x 2.4 inches
it lacks the punk aggression of those two artists. In Lee’s work, the paint is applied slowly and lovingly. It is sumptuous: once we recognise that the pulling of the canvas from the stretcher is not the result of an angry and violent act (it is actually painted like this, the canvas being pulled off first1) we no longer read the red marks on the stretchers as bloody wounds, but as just red. Again, if we look at two of the paintings of the Belong series (pages 14–16 and 18–19) shown in this exhibition, they seem to be about breaking up, but are in fact about connecting—they are more about suturing than breaking. It’s also important to mention that the color red in China (and in Singapore, which is predominantly ethnic Chinese) is a happy color—associated with celebration and good fortune. “The paintings are about happiness, joy, positive energy,” Lee said to me when we were discussing melancholy as a supposedly normative artistic state of mind.2 Melancholy is not the norm for her: “I start the day with mediation. I drive to the studio. I listen to music and dance 5
when I get there.” These paintings that could easily be construed as aggressive are quite the opposite. Nor are they about a turbulent mind: “Meditation brings a sense of joy.” To an increasing degree, Lee sees her approach to painting as being parallel to meditation: “In this body of new works, I try to look at painting in a calm and meditative way—asking what is beyond the surface?” The use of red alone for all bar one of the paintings in this exhibition should be seen in light of this remark: finding complexity in simplicity. It is not a denial of color: there are in fact many different reds in these paintings. Flecks of green, blue or yellow often appear too to emphasise a particular redness.3 In Without Canvas (page 13) there are so many such flecks that, even though they constitute but a few percent of the surface, they make the whole seem like multicoloured cloisonné—they intensify that redness. Lee wants a richness, even a sumptuousness, of surface and effect: hence her use of oil in the Belong series; hence her frequent use of an icing syringe to apply the paint.4 Paintings such as those in the Beneath series (pages 29–33) are sensuous in the way waves at a quayside are sensuous—but it should be emphasised that such a sense of flux and flow in her work is not deliberate—it just happens— like breathing. The work is about letting go and being intuitive: even those works that look mathematical and symmetrical are made intuitively. These are handmade paintings. Earlier works such as Fetish (2009) also included in this exhibition were made by making a skin of paint on a sheet of glass, cutting it into long strips, then rolling them into tight spirals that would then be embedded in the paint surface. Likewise, the Belong paintings are about folding and squeezing the small elements that constitute them. They are hand-sized objects. 6
Lee washes and dries these scraps of canvas, then solidifies them with epoxy. The paint has wax added to it to give it more substance.
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here does this work come from? There is a history of postwar abstraction in Southeast Asia that is larger and more original than generally realized: Sunaryo in Indonesia, Fernando Zóbel de Ayala in the Philippines, Anthony Poon in Singapore and perhaps above all else Mohidin Lattif in Malaysia. Their work was very much to do with taking modernism and inflecting it to greater or lesser extent with local traditions or concerns. But Lee only knows of Poon. Local modernism, though it has not disappeared, is at this moment in a state of retrenchment. Instead, when Lee turned away from the fashion design for which she had been trained in search of a way to express herself more freely and began painting it was Robert Ryman she looked at. She did see one of his paintings in person, “...but I liked the idea of him most.” Lee belongs to a younger generation of artists working in abstraction in Asia. It must be emphasised that although they are geographically isolated, they are not intellectually isolated: these are intelligent and informed artists. In what way, one may ask, is what they are doing different from what is happening in the West? They can begin with a cleaner slate than any artist in the West: they do not pick up the issues of earlier Asian abstraction; they lack such deference. Rather this new abstraction in Southeast Asia is very much about experimentation with materials: other than Jane Lee one could mention Arin Dwihartanto in Bandung, Indonesia, and Raymond Yap in Kuala Lumpur.5 Rather than slavishly adopting and adapting mainstream Western abstraction, they are rather
The making of Belong Series II, Singapore studio, 2011
reacting against the current dominance of figurative art in Asia (much as Ding Yi in Shanghai does). As abstraction has lost its place as a master discourse it is easy for them to manipulate its materials and processes with great freedom and panache.
No handiwork of Callimachus,
Who handled marble as if it were bronze,
Made draperies that seemed to rise
When sea-wind swept the corner, stand.6
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he wind has blown, but then ceased, leaving the curtains frozen in stillness. Time seems paused. In Beyond the Blue (page 37) the painting, like a broken door, seems to have collapsed but what we are left with is not debris, not the marks of violence, accidental or intentional, but a moment of similar stasis to the marble draperies of Callimachus. It is more like a landscape of fabric arranged on the floor than wreckage. As always in Lee’s work we are pulled in close to examine the myriad threads of paint. Many artists have worked with fabrics or drapery, often using them in a grand architectural way, with opulent swags and sheers. But referring to them but by working within painting Lee allows for a crucial act of transformation. (Perhaps the most useful parallel 7
here is the work of Lili Dujourie, a Belgian artist who has made sculptures from plaster that look like drapery.7 Her work too aspires to beauty, but also a sense of the possible or numinous.) Fabric reappears periodically as a metaphor, in Tear (page 23) for example with its reference to torn fabric or Without Canvas where strips of paint are iced onto a sheet of glass and then woven together. But the crucial references are not to any history of fabric but to the physical act of making. It is important to Lee that so many of these paintings—Without Canvas, Without Stretcher—have holes in them, or as with Belong Series I, spread across the wall. We can see through them and see that behind is the wall—and that it too becomes part of the painting. This is not about cutting or separating, but about integrating. Making things whole here is emblematic of Lee’s world view. Belong, Beneath, Beyond—the key word buried at the start of these titles is “be”—are about the ontology of painting, its inner being. But her work is very much of this material world: when I said to her that her work is like Hindu pooja or worship with its anointing of stones and objects, she was surprised but agreed there is a connection. But this is typical of how her work unites apparent opposites: playful and serene, deconstructed and calm, inner directed but sensuous. However, ultimately behind all is that sense of beauty and harmony in the calm: “Breath keeps us alive: this leads to painting and thinking about painting.” —Tony Godfrey, 2012
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Notes 1. Beneath III (pages 32–33) was half-painted before Lee took it off the stretcher, and finished after, allowing as much space for the play of intuition as possible. She is always pragmatic about process. 2. All quotes are from a conversation with the artist January 29, 2012, in her Singapore studio. 3. Lee jokes that she is using the colors of the American flag. 4. Icing syringes are used for icing cakes. The type Lee employs comes with eight different nozzles, all of which she uses. 5. All three of these artists have spent time studying in English art schools: Dwihartanto in Goldsmiths, Yap in Wimbledon, Lee in Camberwell. What they have taken above all from that experience is a sense of freedom. 6. From the poem Lapis Lazuli by W. B. Yeats. 7. Mieke Bal has written about this best, especially in her book Hovering Between Thing and Event—Early Work of Lili Dujourie, Lisson Gallery, 1998.
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Without Stretcher, 2012 mixed media on epoxy canvas, 41.7 x 37.8 x 3.5 inches Opposite: Without Stretcher (detail) 11
Without Canvas, 2012 mixed media on stretcher, 41.7 x 40.6 x 2.4 inches Opposite: Without Canvas (detail) 13
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Belong Series I-Part A, 2011 mixed media on canvas, fifty to sixty pieces in various sizes (continued on page 16) 15
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Belong Series I-Part B, 2012 mixed media on canvas, 49.2 x 49.2 x 2.4 inches 17
Belong Series II, 2011 mixed media on canvas, 49.2 x 78.7 x 3.9 inches Opposite: Belong Series II (detail) 19
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Tear, 2012 mixed media on canvas, 41.3 x 102.4 x 2.4 inches Previous pages: Tear (detail) 23
Belong Series RM, 2012 mixed media on epoxy canvas, 24.4 x 23.6 x 3.9 inches Opposite: Belong Series RM (detail) 25
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Beneath I, 2011 mixed media on canvas, 50.4 x 39.8 x 7.1 inches Previous pages: Beneath I (detail) 29
Beneath II, 2011 mixed media on canvas, 50.4 x 43.3 x 2.8 inches Opposite: Beneath II (detail) 31
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Beneath III, 2011 mixed media on canvas, 65 x 37.4 x 6 inches, stretcher size: 47.2 x 39.4 x 2 inches 33
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Beyond the Blue, 2011 mixed media, 98.4 x 74.8 x 78.7 inches Previous pages: Beyond the Blue (detail) 37
CURRICULUM
VITAE
Born 1963 Lives and works in Singapore SOLO EXHIBITIONS 2012 2011 2009 2006
Jane Lee, Sundaram Tagore Gallery, New York Jane Lee: Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune, Osage Soho, Hong Kong Jane Lee, Osage Gallery, Singapore Transformation/Process, Taksu Gallery, Singapore
2008 2007 2005- 2006
Always here but not always present: Art in a senseless world, Singapore Management University Singapore Art show, Singapore Art Museum Artery: Inaugural Exhibition, The Gallery, Singapore Management University Nasi Campur, Taksu Gallery, Kuala Lumpur, Jakarta and Singapore New Contemporary, Institute of Contemporary Art, Earl Lu Gallery, Singapore
HONORS AND AWARDS SELECTED GROUP EXHIBITIONS 2011 2011 2011 2011 2011 2010 2010 2009 2008 2008
Fabrication, Museum of Art and Design, Manila Celeste Prize Exhibition, The Invisible Dog, New York Jane Lee, Donna Ong, Wilson Sheih, Eslite Gallery, Taipei Collectors Stage, Singapore Art Museum Remaking Art in the Everyday, Marina Bay Sands Convention Centre, Singapore Popping Up: Revisiting the Relationship Between 2D and 3D, Hong Kong Art Centre The Burden of Representation: Abstraction in Asia Today, Osage Kwun Tong, Hong Kong Code Share: 5 continents,10 biennales, 20 artists, The Contemporary Art Centre, Vilnius, Lithuania Wonder, Singapore Biennale 2008 Coffee, Cigarettes, Pad Thai: Contemporary Art in South East Asia, Eslite Gallery, Taipei
Opposite: Jane Lee in her studio, 2011
2011 2007 2007 2005 2003
Celeste Prize, painting category, New York International Residency Art Prize, Singapore Art Exhibition Sovereign Art Prize (finalist), Hong Kong Philip Morris Singapore Art Award (juror’s choice), Singapore ASEAN Art Award (finalist), Singapore
COMMMISSIONS 2010 2008
“NDP Fun Tote,” designed for National Day Parade, Singapore “The Coin Mat,” commissioned by LTA for Circle Line Art, Bartley Station, Singapore
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Sundaram Tagore Galleries Hong Kong 57-59 Hollywood Road Central, Hong Kong Tel 852 2581 9678 Fax 852 2581 9673 hongkong@sundaramtagore.com
New York 547 West 27th Street New York, NY 10001 Tel 212 677 4520 Fax 212 677 4521 gallery@sundaramtagore.com
Beverly Hills 9606 South Santa Monica Blvd Beverly Hills, CA 90210 Tel 310 278 4520 Fax 310 278 4525 beverlyhills@sundaramtagore.com
www.sundaramtagore.com President and curator: Sundaram Tagore Director, New York: Susan McCaffrey Director, Hong Kong: Faina Goldstein Designer: Russell Whitehead Printed in Hong Kong by CA Design
Art consultants: Teresa Kelley Joseph Lawrence Benjamin Rosenblatt Melanie Taylor
First published in Hong Kong in 2012 by Sundaram Tagore Gallery Text Š Sundaram Tagore Gallery Photographs Š Jane Lee All rights reserved under international copyright conventions. No part of this catalogue may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording or any other information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. Cover: Beyond the Blue (detail), 2011, mixed media, 98.4 x 74.8 x 78.7 inches Mission page: Beneath III (detail), 2011, mixed media on canvas, stretcher size: 47.2 x 39.4 x 2 inches
ISBN-13: 978-0-9839631-1-0