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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.
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Meld is a series of new works by Singapore-based artist Jane Lee, which traces her interest in reworking the structural elements of a painting. The series is an extension of the artistic technique she created for her ongoing Portrait series. For this body of work, Lee investigates the material deconstruction of paint–scooping and gouging the surface of thickly caked paint to reveal the heart of the artwork, leaving behind colorful swirling holes and chasms across a previously smooth, unblemished façade. Historically, Lee has been a keen investigator of materiality and form, and she has constantly challenged conventional notions of painting. In the Meld series she utilizes new textures, colors and installation formats never before explored in her practice. Within the suite of six paintings Lee uses basic tools such as her bare hands and everyday implements to manipulate the paint until it coalesces into lush undulating swathes across the planar surface of the work. In the case of Melt V, Lee speckles paint into fine bouquets and ridges, which resemble small colorful galaxies clustered in the four corners of the artwork. The series also reveals Lee’s renewed interest in the sensorial impact of primary colors: vivid scarlet juxtaposed against layers of creamy white, or shades of deep cobalt segueing into lapis lazuli and navy hues.
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Process has always been an important aspect of Lee’s work, however the urgency of process has been given additional impetus here. Within Lee’s earlier and much acclaimed Fetish and Déjà Vu series, she focused on deconstructing formal traditions and structural materiality. Such artistic developments were premeditated and orderly. In this group of new paintings, however, Lee appears to be exercising a highly personal Rosenbergian form of intuitive and spontaneous action painting. The near primal act of using her hands to create texture and movement across the paint surface is her way of communing directly with the essence of the artwork. Lee aspires to a sense of synchronicity constructed through the lowering of one’s inhibitions. The resulting body of works can be seen as an energetic approach to art making in which a certain metaphysical energy transfer occurs between artist and artwork. In recent conversations with the artist, the words “bold” and “expressive” recur, as Lee explains that she is experiencing a new sense of personal spontaneity and a wildness of sort that was not present in her earlier works. Here, process for Lee verges on the performative. The act of working in large scale to create the monumental four-panel In Flux, for instance, is a physical challenge for the diminutive Lee and there is a keen sense of the artist’s confrontation with the material. The recent developments in Lee’s oeuvre can be seen to echo the groundbreaking manifesto of the Japanese Gutai group from the 1970s. As the founder Yoshihara Jiro once stated, “We have decided to pursue enthusiastically the possibilities of pure creativity. We believe that by merging human qualities and material properties, we can concretely comprehend abstract space.”
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Yoshihara’s thesis of merging human qualities (energy) and material properties (paint and supports) in order to adequately comprehend the purity of art making is embodied in the workings of Lee. She is not unlike the Gutai artists who sought to develop elevated ideas of space and harmonious balance without subjective intermediaries between themselves and the final output. As her preoccupations with the classical notion of form have subsided, we can understand the catalyst for the raw physicality of Lee’s movements when scooping, throwing and splattering the paint against the surface of the canvas. The constraining walls of the white cube exhibition space are also part of the artist’s overall consideration as the painting acts as an aberration on the smooth wall surface. There is a specific engagement and alchemy with the wall, against which the urgency and anxiety of her actions palpitate. Seen as a whole, the Meld series marks a new artistic chapter in Lee’s career through which we are able to observe her process-driven practice unfurling and soaring to new heights.
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Melt I, 2016, acrylic paint, heavy gel on fiberglass, 70.9 x 59.5 inches/180 x 151 cm 8
Melt II, 2016, acrylic paint, heavy gel on fiberglass, 70.9 x 59.5 inches/180 x 151 cm 9
Melt III, 2016, acrylic paint, heavy gel on fiberglass, 70.9 x 59.5 inches/180 x 151 cm 12
Melt IV, 2016, acrylic paint, heavy gel on fiberglass, 70.9 x 59.5 inches/180 x 151 cm 13
Melt V, 2016, acrylic paint, heavy gel on fiberglass, 70.9 x 59.5 inches/180 x 151 cm 14
Melt VI, 2016, acrylic paint, heavy gel on fiberglass, 70.9 x 59.5 inches/180 x 151 cm 15
In Flux, 2016, acrylic paint, heavy gel on fiberglass, 86.6 x 239.4 x 4.3 inches/220 x 608 x 11 cm 16
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Adrift (detail), 2016, acrylic paint on mixed medium base, 52.8 inches /134 cm (diameter) 20
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Photograph © Jane Lee, by Lee Ee Guan
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Jane Lee lives and works in Singapore, where she was born in 1963. She 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 exhibitions in museums and galleries in Asia and Europe, among them the Hong Kong Arts Centre and the Contemporary Art Centre in Vilnius, Lithuania. Her most recent solo exhibition was at the Singapore Tyler Print Institute (Freely, Freely, 2016), following a residency in 2015. 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. 23
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N EW YO R K Chelsea: 547 West 27th Street, New York, NY 10001 • tel 212 677 4520 Madison Avenue: 1100 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10028 • tel 212 288 2889 gallery@sundaramtagore.com SINGAPORE 5 Lock Road 01-05, Gillman Barracks, Singapore 108933 • tel +65 6694 3378 singapore@sundaramtagore.com HONG KONG Fourth Floor, 57-59 Hollywood Road, Central, Hong Kong • tel +852 2581 9678 hongkong@sundaramtagore.com
President and curator: Sundaram Tagore Director, New York: Susan McCaffrey Director, Hong Kong: Faina Derman Sales director, Singapore: Melanie Taylor Associate director, Southeast Asia: Shuyin Yang Exhibition coordinators/registrars: Julia Occhiogrosso and Haslinda Abdul Rahman Designer: Russell Whitehead Editorial support: Payal Uttam
W W W . S U N D A R A M TA G O R E . C O M Text © 2017 Sundaram Tagore Gallery Photographs and artwork © 2017 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: Melt V, 2016, acrylic paint, heavy gel on fiberglass, 70.9 x 59.5 inches/180 x 151 cm