Jane lee by Sundaram Tagore Gallery

JANE LEE 100 FACES

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GALLERY MISSION 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.

100 FACES NEW WORKS BY JANE LEE by Khim Ong

Encountering the new works of Jane Lee, one may be surprised. Best known for creating paintings that are rich in texture and sumptuous in colour, she has instead made works that are predominantly white and have smooth surfaces; flat except for a few swaths of color that seem scooped out of the white surface. Among these works are smaller, colorful pieces laid out on the floor, casually stacked in a corner, as if waiting to be coated in white, or perhaps stripped of their white coat. It is as if one has intruded upon works that are in various states of undress, caught in the process of their making.

responds to varying conditions, and the space it occupies. What resulted from these experiments are works that highlight the relationship between the main elements that make up a painting: the stretcher, the canvas and the paint itself, such as in the Beneath series (2011); canvases that clung to and wrapped around corners of rooms (Objecthood, 2009); that danced across a wall as in the Belong series (2011); or paint so heavily laid that it seemed ready to crash onto the viewer (Raw Canvas, 2008) or otherwise cascade and slip down the wall (Status, 2009, and Beyond the Blue, 2011); or are cut and rolled (the Fetish series).

Process is integral to Jane’s practice. Throughout her practice, Jane’s interest has always been in exploring the “true meaning of a painting: from what constitutes a ‘painting’ to how paintings can be constructed.” This led her to focus on investigating the nature of paint: how it can be applied, how it reacts to various surfaces and textures, how it

How then do we make sense of this new body of work? There is none of that visual sumptuousness of texture and surface so characteristic of her previous work, nor are theses pieces rolling, falling or drooping. They are mostly square. They are not too big and are hung neatly on the wall, almost completely white, like the walls they hang from.

Portrait #2, 2013, acrylic paint, heavy gel on mixed-materials base, 48.4 x 48.4 x 2.4 inches

These are very quiet works, calm and unassuming. It may be noted that I have thus far avoided the use of the But they are not devoid of movement. word “painting” when talking about these new works. The immediacy with which Jane works on her pieces, On closer inspection, the surfaces betray their process. with her bare hands, is, rather than that of a painter The surfaces have been scraped, poked and bored to adding layers of paint on a surface to make a painting, reveal swaths of color. Like rivers and craters, these one of a sculptor moulding paint into representations of colors disturb the otherwise smooth white surfaces of form and color. The artist notes that the characteristic the canvas—they are traces left by the painter. And in the of paint, interestingly, resembles cream, both visually simplest, most straightforward manner, they present and materially, and likens her process of making these the viewer with the same tactility and richness so works to a baker lovingly lathering layers of cream on apparent in her previous works. But here, the process desserts and pastries. (Unsurprisingly, early on in her is no less tedious: the works are made of many layers practice, Jane abandoned the brush in favor of tools of different-colored thick gel acrylic paint spread on and objects found in daily life, one of which is a baker’s top of one another even before they’re dry, allowing cream syringe.) one layer of color to tint the next, and finally, scooped out by the artist with her bare hands. The resultant That cream, used in a variety of colors to increase color that is revealed is uncalculated and entirely the visual appeal of desserts, was what gave rise to dependent on how the different layers of colors blend. the colors found in another new work, 100 Faces. As the artist explains, “I consider the walls part of the Although the emphasis here is no longer on process, paintings and in making this new series, I attempt to the question of how paintings are constructed dissolve the boundary of my paintings through using remains at the fore. “Painting is traditionally an additive white as the predominant color…[yet] the tactility and process: we put paint on. In actuality, many painters materiality of paint remains my key concern.” wipe, scrape or sand off more paint than they finally leave on the canvas.”1 In 100 Faces, Jane is precisely Titled Portrait series, these works manifest an identity, interested in the subtractive process of creating a painting. Her approach however, is more intuitive than of paint and paintings. 6

scientific. In working on the pieces, Jane’s thoughts were of different faces (hence the title of the work). The series Stack, consisting literally of stacks of paintings, takes this idea further, in that it presents only the “profile” of these paintings. Unable to see the “face” of the paintings, the viewer’s curiosity is piqued by the promise of visual extravagance the rich paint seeping at its edges suggests, but they can be contented only with the limited view offered. In both 100 Faces and the Stack series, the works are placed on the floor emphasising their status as paintings as objects, at the same time inviting the viewer to respond with both eyes and body (to properly examine these works, one needs to bend over, crouch and tilt one’s head).

Tony Godfrey, Painting Today (London: Phaidon Press, 2009), p. 126.

Khim Ong, curator of Jane Lee: 100 Faces, is an independent curator based in Singapore. She was previously a program executive for the Master of Arts Degree in Contemporary Art program at Sotheby’s Institute of Art – Singapore and a curatorial assistant at the Institute of Contemporary Arts Singapore, LASALLE College of the Arts. Curatorial projects include Landscape Memories at Espace Louis Vuitton Singapore (2013), Biographies, co-curated with Biljana Ciric at Osage Gallery, Hong Kong (2010), Welcome to the Real World at Singapore The works in this exhibition mark a significant shift in Management University (2009), and solo exhibitions Jane Lee’s practice—a move away from big, visually of Antony Gormley, Wolfgang Laib, On Kawara, Nipan spectacular works. They also signify a refreshed state of Oranniwesna, and Sun Yuan & Peng Yu. mind—an emptying out of all the pretensions paintings inevitably carry in their visual splendor, seeking instead a deeper, perhaps more spiritual, engagement. These are very quiet works. They are portraits of paint—one may not recognise these faces but they invite intimacy.

PARTAKING OF PAINT by Patrick D. Flores The stack of paintings on fiberglass tricks the eye—or, better still, whets the palate. Are those pieces of bread lying atop each other, with butter or jam between them? The layer of spread becomes an interval of space and a gap filled with substance that ever so slightly though markedly spills over, the weight of the matter that holds it seemingly putting pressure on the viscosity of such a lavish layer. From a certain angle, this sight of the stack is informed by excess and edge: the paint that oozes out drips onto the perimeter of these multiple slates of paint, caking as it were at the fringes, around their dainty, messy seams. It is quite copious. The artist Jane Lee confides: The motivation in conjuring this tableau is to reference the consistency, texture, feel of cream. It is this cream-effect that figures in the wider project of dissembling, of hinting at the desire for desserts, of approaching paint as a kind of delectation. The painting in this instance resembles neither the reality of a transparent world nor the opacity of a contrivance. It rather mimics the effect of a material, a radically empirical undertaking that aspires to being a thing, which in turn is reciprocated by an eye that can only see objects. This effect leads us to the ways by which she subjects painting to a range of partaking as if it were food. This cream is largely white, and it is the vehicle through which the canvas is saturated to the point that its function as support is ultimately diminished. Clearly, on the table here is painting so profuse that it becomes irresistible. Surely, painting, speckled randomly with stray color, is no longer just something to look at; it is meant to be partaken.

The theorist of modern art Richard Shiff has elegantly drawn our attention to the physicality of Paul Cézanne’s painting and to an intriguing argument on the “politics of touch.” Shiff quotes Auguste Renoir and Jasper Johns to round out the conversation. Renoir is cited as saying that a painter “had only to put a single stroke (touche) of color on a canvas for it to merit interest.”1 This interest, according to Johns, “makes looking equivalent to touching.”2 With these thoughts in mind, the focus shifts from a fully formed painting to the procedure of painting. There is also a critical turn from the act of looking to the gesture of touching, a different address to the senses, and a new mode of provoking the one who views who is now the one who may touch at the same time. Shiff then points out that “touches, not vision, make a picture…Do we mean that a painting is created by touching? Or, rather, that it is composed of touches…the name of an action, touching a surface to leave a mark, is transferred to the mark itself as the effect of this cause; touching (usually with the aid of a brush) makes a paint mark, so a paint mark becomes a touch.”3 Lee is immersed in this preoccupation, vexed by the vanity: the materiality of painting and the condition of the painter as she confronts the technique of the art and the tropes of its facture. She even ventures further by letting go of the brush altogether and directly touching the canvas that is already so worked up, or better to say, belabored by paint, “extending the hand forward to make the simple contact with the resistance of a surface.”4 This friction effected by the meeting of the flesh of the creative agent and the ground incarnated by touch is not the end of the

Left: 100 Faces (detail), 2013, acrylic paint, heavy gel on mixed-materials base, 100 panels, 5.9 x 6.3 x 2.4 inches each

deed. The artist is inclined to more deeply compromise the completion of the painting and impair its integrity as a fulfilled thing, which lends itself inevitably to circulation as coveted possession. To a degree then, the salivating, ruminating viewer is frustrated, twice negated: denied the substance of food, denied the objecthood of painting. The rest, the leavings, are sheer paint. In light of this propensity, Lee does not so much build on canvas and the palimpsest of paint as test both their threshold and conceit, so that what alights from the exercise is a dis-figure, the tactility and density, an allegory of futility and not really of materiality. In fact, one leaves the event this sort of painting stages feeling that the apparatus of the art has dissolved, the boundary between plane and pigment rendered porous, with the latter bleeding into a starkly white blank picture that is finally enlivened or animated (or maybe tainted and corrupted) by the vivid streaks of importuning, inhering paint on unyielding paint. And we do not see the frames necessarily fixed on the wall; they might be on the floor, all of a hundred of them, the better to challenge the space itself that painting inhabits and the attitude toward which the public of painting may regard it. The artist calls them “portraits,” with ridges of color disrupting the white continuum, with the paint appearing to be enfolded into the flat, though rather robust, vessel that is persistently called painting. How are these marks realized? Are they fiddled? We might ask if all this finally undoes the two crucial forces at work in painting: the objecthood of painting, because it is outstripped, and the performance of looking at the painting, because it is starved of the expectation of how painting should shed its skin. Again, Shiff prompts us to consider a thing or two about such a scheme, and he turns to Pablo Picasso to make the point. According to 10

him, Picasso, late in his life, revisited the Cézanne in his collection, The Sea at L’Estaque, “rapped his hand against its densely structured marks of blue, blue-green and blueviolet, saying: ‘Look at the sea, it’s solid as a rock.”5 What is curious about this remark is the mingling of looking at a delineation of nature, on the one hand, and feeling the touch of what has been gleaned visually, on the other. This would stir Shiff to say that “one was led to touch as much as look, inspecting the image by knocking against it.”6 This transcendence of the needless duality between seeing and sensing, as well as the primacy of the visual in the modern aesthetic, is important in the practice of painters who are keen to probe the material of their art and the intuition of their possible attentive observers to espy the artifice. Because the artist finally finds the impetus to play, she is freed from the burden of paint’s incommensuration: that it is just medium, if it is about the world, or paint is just object, if it is about itself. It dawns on her that it is, all told, facture and as such it can be an index of making itself, of making something else, or of remaking that which makes it. Like flower that flourishes or fabric that frays in earlier forays, painting in the hands and imaginarium of Lee is fair game. But why engage in this rather tedious toil of revealing painting’s vulnerability and simultaneously affirming its survival, its virtuosity as a device that refuses to be worn down as an expression and keeps on recurring in the history of art? There lies a tension between the overinvestment in the reflexivity of the decisively opaque medium and the underexplanation of the necessity to demystify its pretensions to transparency. Perhaps, art history in Southeast Asia can offer a clue: how Abstract Expressionism, for instance, an export of the Cold War from America, became a cipher of at once autonomy and assimilation, of a restive unconscious and the failure

of figuration. This obsession with paint may also be discerned as a vector of the post-colonial artist’s will to assert presence and culture, betraying aspirations of belongingness to a global time, in different places with others, in the season when nations in the region were firming up their independence, the form of their freedom and the culmination of their tutelage. The Indonesian Affandi and the Filipino José Joya represented their countries at the Venice Biennale in the fifties and sixties with their signature expressionist stroke, marked by sentimental and tempestuous flinging of paint onto the canvas, their art troubled by the gravitas of paint and the energy of the citizen-painter. This is but an episode in the longer story of the fretfulness over what matters as pictures. The series by contemporary artists Alfredo and Isabel Aquilizan on the so-called Mabini paintings, named after a district in postwar Manila selling “commercial” pictures that actually was descended from the illustrious career of the romantic-realist painter Fernando Amorsolo, comes to mind as a cognate. They would cut up the works, reframe them, reinstall them, disperse them, and at one time, made a stack of stretched canvases, forming a pillar of “beautiful” paintings, with only their edges seen. In this exhibition of Lee’s paintings, what may be at stake is the recognition of the lure of painting and the anxiety of the painter to either exhaust this lure or to succumb to the temptation of its thorough sensuality and even eroticism. That said, there is also something clinical about this operation, with its cold, if not altogether severe, approach to the untidy process of painting. The artist in this situation invites us to indulge in the guilty pleasures of painting, craving it and even participating in consuming it as a viable, collectible “picture.” In other words, the tale of this task takes us to the habit of liking and, at last, to the churning of taste.

Richard Shiff, “Cézanne’s Physicality: The Politics of Touch” in The Language of Art History, eds. Salim Kemal and Ivan Gaskell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 133. 2 Shiff, 1991, p. 134. 3 Shiff, 1991, p. 135. 4 Shiff, 1991, p. 135. 5 Richard Shiff, “Mark, Motif, Materiality: The Cézanne Effect in the Twentieth Century” in Critical Readings in Impressionism and Post-Impressionism: An Anthology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), p. 308. 6 Shiff, 2007, p. 312. 1

Patrick D. Flores is professor of Art Studies at the Department of Art Studies at the University of the Philippines and curator of the Vargas Museum, Manila. He is adjunct curator at the National Art Gallery, Singapore. He was one of the curators of Under Construction: New Dimensions in Asian Art in 2000 and the Gwangju Biennale (Position Papers) in 2008. He was a visiting fellow at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, in 1999 and an Asian Public Intellectuals Fellow in 2004. He was a grantee of the Asian Cultural Council (2010) and a member of the advisory board of the exhibition The Global Contemporary: Art Worlds After 1989 (2011) organized by the Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe and member of the Guggenheim Museum’s Asian Art Council (2011). Among his publications are Art, History, and the National Museum (2006) and Past Peripheral: Curation in Southeast Asia (2008). He convened in 2013 on behalf of the Clark Institute and the Department of Art Studies of the University of the Philippines the conference “Histories of Art History in Southeast Asia” in Manila.

Portrait #1 2013, acrylic paint, heavy gel on mixed-materials base, 48.4 x 48.4 x 2.4 inches 13

Portrait #5 2013, acrylic paint, heavy gel on mixed-materials base, 48.4 x 48.4 x 2.4 inches 15

Portrait #9 2013, acrylic paint, heavy gel on mixed-materials base, 48.4 x 72.8 x 2.4 inches 17

Stack #2 2013, acrylic paint, heavy gel on mixed-materials base, 45.2 x 12.2 x 12.6 inches overall 19

Portrait #8 2013, acrylic paint, heavy gel on mixed-materials base, 72 x 48.4 x 2.4 inches 21

Portrait #4 2013, acrylic paint, heavy gel on mixed-materials base, 48.4 x 48.4 x 2.4 inches 23

Stack #1 2013, acrylic paint, heavy gel on mixed-materials base, 51.2 x 16.5 x 13 inches overall 25

Portrait #6 2013, acrylic paint, heavy gel on mixed-materials base, 72 x 48.4 x 2.4 inches 27

Previous page: 100 Faces, 2013, acrylic paint, heavy gel on mixed-materials base, 100 panels, 5.9 x 6.3 x 2.4 inches each

Selection from 100 Faces, 2013, acrylic paint, heavy gel on mixed-materials base, 5.9 x 6.3 x 2.4 inches each

Stack #3 2013, acrylic paint, heavy gel on mixed-materials base, 39.4 x 12.2 x 8.3 inches overall 33

Portrait #3 2013, acrylic paint, heavy gel on mixed-materials base, 48.4 x 48.4 x 2.4 inches 35

Subtract 2013, acrylic paint, heavy gel on mixed-materials base, 47.2 x 47.2 x 2 inches 37

CURRICULUM VITAE Born 1963; lives and works in Singapore

SOLO EXHIBITIONS 2014 2013 2012 2011 2009 2006

Jane Lee: 100 Faces, Sundaram Tagore Gallery, Singapore Jane Lee: Secret Garden, Mizuma Gallery, Tokyo Jane Lee: Beyond, 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

SELECTED GROUP EXHIBITIONS To Be a Lady, Sundaram Tagore Gallery, Singapore Painting in Singapore, Equatorial Art Project, Gillman Barracks, Singapore The Realm in the Mirror, the Vision Out of Image, Jinji Art museum, Suzhou, China Landscape Memories, Espace Louis Vuitton, Singapore Encounter, Experience and Environment, Singapore, Gillman Barracks Panorama: Recent Art From Contemporary Asia, Singapore, SAM at 8Q 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 2010 Popping Up: Revisiting the Relationship Between 2D and 3D, Hong Kong Arts Centre The Burden of Representation: Abstraction in Asia Today, Osage Kwun Tong, Hong Kong 2009 Code Share: 5 Continents, 10 Biennales, 20 Artists, The Contemporary Art Centre, Vilnius, Lithuania 2008 Wonder, Singapore Biennale 2008 Coffee, Cigarettes, Pad Thai: Contemporary Art in South East Asia, Eslite Gallery, Taipei Always Here But Not Always Present: Art in a senseless world, Singapore Management University 2007 Singapore Art show, Singapore Art Museum 2005-06 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 2014 2013 2012 2011

HONORS AND AWARDS 2011 2007 2005 2003

Winner, Celeste Prize for painting, New York Winner, International Residency Art Prize, Singapore Art Exhibition Finalist, The Sovereign Art Prize, Hong Kong Juror’s Choice, Philip Morris Singapore Art Awards, Singapore Finalist, Singapore-Asean Art Awards

COMMISSIONS 2010 2008

Fun Tote, bag design, commissioned by NDP, Singapore Coin Mat, commissioned by LTA for circle line art, Bartley station, Singapore

Left: Portrait #9 (detail), 2013, acrylic paint, heavy gel on mixed-materials base, 48.4 x 72.8 x 2.4 inches

SUNDARAM TAGORE GALLERIES new york new york hong kong singapore

547 West 27th Street, New York, NY 10001 • tel 212 677 4520 fax 212 677 4521 • gallery@sundaramtagore.com 1100 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10028 • tel 212 288 2889 57-59 Hollywood Road, Central, Hong Kong • tel 852 2581 9678 fax 852 2581 9673 • hongkong@sundaramtagore.com 01-05 Gillman Barracks, 5 Lock Road, Singapore 108933 • tel 65 6694 3378 • singapore@sundaramtagore.com

President and curator: Sundaram Tagore Director, New York: Susan McCaffrey Director, Hong Kong: Faina Derman Designer: Russell Whitehead

Art consultants: Teresa Kelley Bonnie B. Lee Sarah Miller Deborah Moreau Mairead O’Connor Benjamin Rosenblatt Melanie Taylor

Jane Lee: 100 Faces was curated by Khim Ong in conjunction with Sundaram Tagore Gallery. Artwork in this publication is protected by copyright and may not be reproduced in any form without written request. No part of this publication 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 Sundaram Tagore Gallery.