Jane Lee

jane lee

gallery mission Sundaram Tagore Gallery is devoted to examining the exchange of ideas between Western and non-Western cultures. With spaces in Hong Kong, Singapore and New York City (in Chelsea and on Madison Avenue), the gallery was the first to focus exclusively on the rise of globalization in contemporary art. The gallery represents painters, sculptors and photographers from around the world. They each work in different mediums and use diverse techniques, but share a passion for cross-cultural dialogue. The gallery is renowned for its support of cultural activities—including poetry readings, book launches, music performances and film screenings—that further its mission of East-West exchange.

it is as it is: painting as mere existence

By Michelle Ho

“An artistic act is both the institution of a form and a provocation to formlessness.

It denotes of a paradoxical effort to fix in the finiteness of forms that which motivates one to make art: a taste for the infinite that exceeds finite forms, an attraction for the insignificant that hollows out sensible figures. This altercation of form and formlessness, of the finite and the infinite, of the full and the empty, is what generates.. (works of art that perform) nothing, but nothingness itself… “ – Christine Pringent 1 “… Form is emptiness, and emptiness is form. Form is not other than emptiness, and emptiness not other than form; whatever is form, that is emptiness, and whatever is emptiness, that is form.”

- The Heart Sutra (Source: translated from “The Prajñāpāramitā-hṛdaya sutra” ed. Edward Conze, in Thirty Years of Buddhist Studies)

Jane Lee’s paintings are less interested in depicting external phenomena than they are in revealing the internal world of painting, examining the very nature of paint itself, its latent properties and potentials as both material and object. Through the course of her career, Lee has engaged with techniques like cutting, gouging and stripping, frequently departing from the reliance of a canvas’ stretcher support or four-sided frame. On one level, they are formal investigations into the nature of the medium. On another, these incursions do not negate the conception of painting. Instead, they result in works that present an indeterminate void while retaining a sense of wholeness. Her works are both painting and non-painting. They are both deconstructed, and reconstructed entities. They embody both form and emptiness.

This paradox lies in the center of a renowned Mahayana Buddhist text, the Heart Sutra (Prajñāpāramitāhṛdaya), where the bodhisattva Avalokiteśvara expounded that all experiences of reality are impermanent, inherently void, and without intrinsic essence.2 It is one of the most complex teachings in Buddhist philosophies regarding nonduality – “Form is emptiness, and emptiness is form” – that seems to embody contradictory positions. This principle of enfolding the co-existence of opposites can also be said to be at the core of many of Lee’s works.

In this exhibition, the binary conditions of form and emptiness are explored in a largely monochromatic palette in a new body of works which marks a departure from her previous works, often engaging with a wide spectrum of colors. To be certain, the intricacies of Buddhist epistemology go far deeper than what Lee’s practice may exemplify. Nonetheless, this root teaching of the Heart Sutra can still serve as an apt entry point to understanding her approach to the making of her works.

And what of her works – these three-dimensional painting-like things that veer into the domain of sculpture or expand into space as installation? To the art collector, these forms are paintings of value, works of art that provide hours of intangible viewing pleasure. To the art historian, they can be read as examples of artistic practices that exemplify or problematize prevailing discourses surrounding painting. To the artist, the answer is more complex.

Things acquire different meanings at various stages of their purpose, from the genesis of an inspiration in the artist’s studio, to the realization of its intent in an exhibition, and to its subsequent life (and lifetimes) in the art market. Yet, remove a painting of its title, subject matter and market significance and revert it to its base materials and it is essentially acrylic, wood and raw canvas – it is as it is.

Lee has consistently sought to question the nature of painting through the manipulation of material, and this has remained a key preoccupation in her practice spanning over 15 years with the artist’s penchant for letting her devised methodologies of painting take lead. Taken in this regard, we begin to see how Lee’s approach, or as she says, “letting cause and effect in painting to happen”,3 is based on a fundamental awareness of, and adeptness with the medium’s possible states of flux that allows her to find new modes of expression.

This play between art and ontological status vis-à-vis conceptions of form and emptiness becomes more apparent when we look at Lee’s Wall Series #1 and Wall Series #8, made of thin painted strips of canvas that accumulate on a four-cornered plane with a lone strip exposed. The suggestion of the origin of the makings of the works is intentional. Lee wants viewers of the work to see the foundation of her pieces – paintings of canvas but not on canvas. The works in the exhibition develop from an earlier 2017 work The Story of Canvas #2, where twines of canvas expanded into an installation, or into a painting, depending on which perspective its viewer took. To Lee, they are all the same – the given form of painting or installation are naming conventions that ultimately arise from same source material, and are synonymous in substance.

The Story of Canvas #2, wall-mounted painting and floor sculpture installed on opposite sides of a wall, 2017

Bond II, installation, 2009

Lee has previously professed an interest in the Zen philosophy of emptiness (śūnyatā), with yoga being an integral part of her life, and how her approach to painting at times parallels the act of meditation.4 Be that as it may, the artist does not does not over-intellectualize the application of metaphysical theory in her work. For Lee, the works Heart Sutra series #1 - 2, are not a direct response to the sutra itself, but rather, an interpretation of the reverberations of a chant – created through a multiplication of expanding cut-out heart motifs – that forms the basis the composition of the work. This notion of repetition as a symbolic gesture of art-making can be seen in the works It Is as It Is, Roll series # 1 - 4, where hundreds of spiraled canvas strips have been rolled and accumulated into larger entities.

In Play series #1 and It Is as It Is, Play series #2 - #5, the metaphor of art as game is being implied through the application of the symbols of club, diamond, heart and spade into the works. At the hands of the artist however, gaming conventions have been made void with no suit ranking higher than the other. A club is derived from a spade, and a diamond extracted from a heart. No symbol is weaker or more valuable than another, each piece presenting a neutral statement of chance and possibility.

Elsewhere in the exhibition, Lee returns to her earlier forays of expanding her medium into space. A decade ago, she introduced the idea of wall as canvas in Bond II, where paint and canvas were embedded directly into the gallery walls in three variations, creating an unexpected pairing between art and the everyday, and prompting critical questions surrounding the medium of painting. In the present exhibition, It Is as It Is, Wall series #2, #3 and #6 #7 are installed with walls partially applied with the same colors corresponding to those in the works, such that the supporting gallery walls perform an extension of the works themselves. While the three-dimensionality of her works allow for painting to maintain a distinctive identity as a separate entity, the artist in expanding its presence on its surrounding walls also blurs the boundaries as to where the work ends. By way of a reductive rationalisation along the lines of her investigation into the essence of painting, the artist seems to question further the fundamental difference between the painting on canvas, and the paint/ing of the wall, as well as the subjectivities of meaning and value wherein the process of definition takes place.

“The surroundings where a painting takes place in is of concern to me,” said Lee. “I didn’t want to make a painting that is alienated from its space. People tend to talk about the idea of pictorial space. Here I want to create a dialogue between the internal and external space surrounding painting.”5 The need as a painter, to engage meaningfully with site and space brings to mind the works of the American painter Robert Ryman, who had been inspirational to Lee in her formative years of practice.6 We begin to detect more affinities between the two, not just in their interest to work beyond the boundaries of the medium, but also how their works coalesce in an ultimate experience of what meaning in painting could be like, although both practices remain distinct. French conceptual artist Daniel Buren noted that Ryman, likewise through conscientious processes of introducing the wall as part of a painting, had achieved a “complexity of his work (which) seems to be accentuated even more by the emptiness of the transmitted image.”7 In this regard, Lee’s works stand out in as far as it does not deploy minimalism as a means to attain her vision. For the artist, there is often times no distinction between the results of the processes of accumulation and reduction of the paint material, no incongruence between emptiness and form. This corresponds to Mark Epstein’s essay on artists who work with the theme of emptiness, where understanding of the philosophy of śūnyatā does not equate to encompassing of nothingness, but the realisation that there is something positive and creative that underlies all experiences.

“While the self, or the object, may not be the concrete, self-sufficient entity that we imagined, the alternative is not nothingness. Emptiness is best compared to the hollow of a pregnant womb; shunyata is derived from the Sanskrit word shiv, which means swelling, like the swelling of a seed as it expands. There is a fullness to emptiness, a sense of spaciousness that both holds and suffuses the stuff of the world. Not to appreciate this fullness is the great stumbling block of the deconstruction of the self, and one that many people, including some contemporary artists, fall prey to…

The great challenge of emptiness is the ability to truly appreciate the stuff of this world, qualified, as it is said in the Buddhist teachings, by ‘mere existence’.” 8

This capacity to know things as they are as qualified by “mere existence”, and in Lee’s case, recognising a thing as it is, to see painting for what it essentially is, is what connects Lee’s work to a recurring play between form and emptiness.

About the Writer Michelle Ho is Gallery Director of the ADM Gallery at the NTU School of Art, Design and Media. She has over 10 years’ experience in curating Singapore, Southeast Asian and international contemporary art, including shows like Reformations: Painting in Post 2000 Singapore Art (2019), In Praise of Shadows (2018) and The Art of Conflict: Video Works from the Asia Society Museum Collection (2017). She was also co-curator for Time of Others (2015 – 2016), a collaborative exhibition with Queensland Art Gallery (QAGOMA), Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo (MOT) and National Museum of Art, Osaka (NMAO), and was co-curator of the Singapore Biennale 2013.

In 2018, she was appointed curator for the Singapore Pavilion, 59th Venice Biennale.

Formerly a curator at the Singapore Art Museum, she has led the acquisition strategies of its contemporary art collection from 2013 - 2015, and was in charge of its Thailand collection.

Endnotes 1. Christine Pringent, ‘A Regard for painting (la peinture me regarde)’ in As Painting: Division and Displacement eds. Philip Armstrong, Laura Lisbon and Steven Melville, Cambridge: The MIT Press, p179 2. John Strong, ‘The Heart Sutra’ in The Experience of Buddhism: Sources and Interpretations, 2nd Ed, California: Wadsworth, 2002 pp 143--44 3. Conversation with Jane Lee, 31 January 2017 4. Michelle Ho, ‘In Conversation with Jane Lee’ in Rise and Fall, Ebb and Flower: Works of Jane Lee, Singapore: Primz Gallery, 2017, p 12 and Payal Uttam, Q+A in Jane Lee: Recent Paintings 2015 + 2016, New York: Sundaram Tagore Gallery, 2016, pp 54-55.

5. Conversation with Jane Lee on 29 Jul, 2019 6. Tony Godfrey, Jane Lee: Recent Paintings, Hong Kong: Sundaram Tagore Gallery, 2012, p6 7. Daniel Buren, ‘The Ineffable – About Ryman’s Work’ in As Painting: Division and Displacement eds. Philip Armstrong, Laura Lisbon and Steven Melville, Cambridge: The MIT Press, p249 8. Mark Epstein, ‘Sip My Ocean: Emptiness as Inspiration’ in Buddha Mind In Contemporary Art, eds. Jacquelynn Baas and Mary Jane Jacob, Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2004, pp 34 – 35.

It Is as It Is #1 2019, acrylic paint and canvas on wood, 71 x 48 x 2.4 inches/181 x 122 x 6 cm

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It Is as It Is, Wall series #4 2019, acrylic paint and canvas on wood, 48.4 x 25 x 2.4 inches/123 x 64 x 6 cm

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It Is as It Is, Wall series #6 2019, acrylic paint and canvas on wood, 48.4 x 25 x 2.4 inches/123 x 64 x 6 cm

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It Is as It Is, Wall series #5 2019, acrylic paint and canvas on wood, 48.4 x 25 x 2.4 inches/123 x 64 x 6 cm

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It Is as It Is, Wall series #8 2019, acrylic paint and canvas on wood, 48.4 x 25 x 2.4 inches/123 x 64 x 6 cm

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It Is as It Is, Wall series #1 2019, acrylic paint and canvas on wood, 48.4 x 25 x 2.4 inches/123 x 64 x 6 cm

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It Is as It Is #3 2019, acrylic paint and canvas on wood, 41 x 41 x 5 inches/104 x 104 x 13 cm

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It Is as It Is #2 2019, acrylic paint and canvas on wood and fiberglass, 74 x 74 x 4 inches/188 x 188 x 10 cm

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It Is as It Is, Wall series #3 2019, acrylic paint and canvas on wood, 48.4 x 25 x 2.4 inches/123 x 64 x 6 cm

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It Is as It Is, Wall series #2 2019, acrylic paint and canvas on wood, 48.4 x 25 x 2.4 inches/123 x 64 x 6 cm

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It Is as It Is, Wall series #7 2019, acrylic paint and canvas on wood, 48.4 x 25 x 2.4 inches/123 x 64 x 6 cm

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Don’t Fit #1 2019, acrylic paint and canvas on wood, 48.4 x 41.7 x 7 inches/123 x 106 x 18 cm

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Don’t Fit #2 2019, acrylic paint, heavy gel and canvas on wood, 47.2 x 40.9 x 7 inches/120 x 104 x 18 cm

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It Is as It Is, Roll series #1 2019, acrylic paint and canvas on wood and fiberglass, 48.4 x 25 x 3 inches/123 x 64 x 7 cm

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It Is as It Is, Roll series #2 2019, acrylic paint and canvas on wood, 88.2 x 10.2 x 2 inches/224 x 26 x 5 cm

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It Is as It Is, Roll series #3 2019, acrylic paint and canvas on wood, 10.2 x 88.2 x 2 inches/26 x 246 x 5 cm

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It Is as It Is, Roll series #3 (detail)

It Is as It Is, Roll series #4 2019, acrylic paint and canvas on wood, 10.2 x 88.2 x 2 inches/26 x 246 x 5 cm

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It Is as It Is, Roll series #4 (detail)

It Is as It Is, Play series #6 2019, laser-cut metal and acrylic, 33 x 40.2 inches/84 x 102 cm

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It Is as It Is, Play series #1 2019, acrylic paint and canvas on wood, 71 x 48 x 2.4 inches/180 x 122 x 6 cm

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It Is as It Is, Play series #2 2019, acrylic paint and canvas on wood, 63 x 23 x 2.4 inches/160 x 58 x 6 cm

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It Is as It Is, Play series #3 2019, acrylic paint and canvas on wood, 63 x 23 x 2.4 inches/160 x 58 x 6 cm

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It Is as It Is, Play series #4 2019, acrylic paint and canvas on wood, 63 x 23 x 2.4 inches/160 x 58 x 6 cm

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It Is as It Is, Play series #5 2019, acrylic paint and canvas on wood, 63 x 23 x 2.4 inches/160 x 58 x 6 cm

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It Is as It Is, Heart Sutra series #2 2019, acrylic paint and canvas on wood, 2 panels, each 48 x 15.7 x 2.4 inches/122 x 40 x 6 cm

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It Is as It Is, Heart Sutra series #1 2019, acrylic paint and canvas on wood, 6 panels, each 48 x 12.6 x 2 inches/122 x 32 x 5 cm

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It Is as It Is, Heart Sutra series #1 (detail)

Photograph © Jane Lee, photo by Lee Ee Guan

jane lee Paint, canvas, frame, orientation and dimension—all are variables in Jane Lee’s hands.

Through assiduous processes of layering, mixing, winding, wrapping, kneading, daubing and other acts of physical transformation, the renowned Singaporean artist redefines paint and painting to produce dynamic and bold forms. Operating in a post-colonial Southeast Asian context, Lee re-examines the significance of Western painting practices while asserting her own culture. Pushing the boundaries of the medium, her work echoes the breakdown of cultural barriers in the era of globalization and affirms the universality of contemporary art.

Jane Lee has a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree and a Diploma in Fashion from LASALLE College of the Arts in Singapore. Lee has participated in numerous art fairs and exhibitions across the globe. Notable shows include Red States, a critically acclaimed exhibition at the Hong Kong Arts Centre in 2018, Meld, her solo presentation at Art Basel in 2017, and Freely, Freely at the Singapore Tyler Print Institute in 2016, which followed her 2015 residency.

Lee has won numerous awards, including a Celeste Prize for painting in 2011. She was the first recipient of the Singapore Art Exhibition International Residency Prize in 2007 and was a finalist for the 2007 Sovereign Asian Art Prize. Her work Raw Canvas was showcased at the Singapore Biennale 2008, Collectors’ Stage at the Singapore Art Museum in 2011 and in the Southeast Asia Platform, an exhibition of cutting-edge work from across the region at Art Stage Singapore in 2014. In the following year, Lee’s work was selected for Prudential Singapore Eye, one of the largest surveys of Singapore’s contemporary art to date, held at the ArtScience Museum and Medium at Large, a year-long exhibition at the Singapore Art Museum, where her large-scale installation Status, 2009, was acquired for the museum’s permanent collection. In 2015, Lee also participated in Frontiers Reimagined, a Collateral Event of the 56th Venice Biennale.

Born in Singapore, 1963 | Lives and works in Singapore

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www.sundaramtagore.com Text © 2019 Sundaram Tagore Gallery Photographs © 2019 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: It Is as It Is, Wall series #4 (detail), 2019, acrylic paint and canvas on wood, 48.4 x 25 x 2.4 inches/123 x 64 x 6 cm