JANE LEE RECENT PAINTINGS 2015 + 2016
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.
FOREWORD This catalogue surveys a series of new paintings by Jane Lee, which have been in development for several years and finally completed over the past twenty-two months. Her extraordinary range as a painter comes to the fore in this particular body of work; cohesive yet diverse, it pushes the boundaries of experimentation with tactile materiality and structural form. In her latest constructions, Lee moves in a new direction, exploring the concepts of negative space and updating its traditional role within contemporary art practice. In recent months, Lee has been preoccupied with the idea of painterly excavation: creating holes and fissures in otherwise densely laden, slicked-down surfaces. These punctures function as silent spaces—exhalations of breath—teasing the viewer about the real foci of her paintings, as they oscillate between presence and absence. With an almost archaeological line of inquiry, Lee scoops and punctures decisively, revealing hidden subterranean linings to the paintings, runs and explosions of color, and reflective mirrors or hollows. The interplay between the structure of paintings and wall surfaces forms the basis of Wall Matters, her current exhibition at Sundaram Tagore Madison Avenue (pages 42 to 55). Walls are important to Lee; not merely a backdrop or barrier, walls are an activating space, carrying subtle energy and possibilities. The structural engagement between painting and wall is a specific form of alchemy. Lee explores the total environment of an artwork, rather than restricting herself to the physical limitations of a single canvas plane. Some of the paintings appear to melt or implode, sliding off their whitewashed supports. In others, Lee’s perseverance in punching through the heart of the artwork and wall itself—leaving a crater-like void through the conjoined centers—creates a telescoping effect to show a miniature gem of a painting nestling in the far distance. These process-driven creations, both forceful and sensuous, reveal Lee to be in the midst of a continuous artistic journey. Shuyin Yang Sundaram Tagore Singapore
SPILL, FLOW AND THROW TONY GODFREY Whenever I start to write about Jane Lee’s paintings I find myself thinking carefully about the words I should use to describe them, because we need not just describe them, but also evoke the particular shapes, forms and textures she creates from paint and other materials. What she is trying to evolve with her manifold inventions is not unlike a non-verbal vocabulary and, as such, it can only be paralleled by a verbal vocabulary that does not just give its elements mere dictionary definitions, but evokes their shape, sound and texture. I sit with her in her studio and she asks me whether the word “drool” describes how the paint blobs and flows in a suite of her most recent paintings. It sounds right but the association with fluids or senility makes it wrong. It sounds too abject. We may recall how Julia Kristeva uses that word, “abject,”1 and how art critics in the 1990s used the word to describe the early work of Kiki Smith or Janine Antoni.2 It is the same for “slobber” or “dribble,” two other words she suggests. They sound good, but likewise have inappropriate abject associations—of the body being out of control or breaking down, of being ragged at the edges. “Seep” is another word she likes. Like the others, it sounds good. It has a nice touch of onomatopoeia. (Perhaps a more proper term is ideophone—a word that evokes an idea in sound.) That word “seep” conjures the curious viscosity of paint, but perhaps it sounds too much like a word from the machine shop? She wants a word that is playful but not unpleasant. A word that suggest health and happiness rather than illness or infirmity. We need to find a word that is the opposite of abject, but I do not think it exists. What words can we use? Inventing words such as “gloop,” “splut” or “phlob” is no answer. They sound too comic and pop art-ish.
7
I think of using breath rather than liquids to suggest the body, but phrases such as “exhale solidity” or “when exhalation becomes matter” sound too pompous. Eventually Lee decided on the word melt3 for this new group of paintings. I smile when an email from the gallery wonderfully misspells it as “meld.” Apart from being an obscure word in card playing, meld is a teasing blend of weld and mold. It is a two-way action—to melt and mold. Of course paint is a material that can be made liquid or semi-liquid to manipulate across a surface and having been molded will turn solid, and in other than exceptional circumstances, will not melt again (the museums of the world would be in dire trouble if the paint on Old Master or Impressionist works started to melt again!). Although Lee wanted a one-word title, a short crisp pointer, one word cannot suggest the complex transformations that paint undergoes in her work. It is both a luxury and necessity to use phrases, sentences and paragraphs to make a more complex objective correlative of what the paint has been made or allowed to do. When I first wrote about Lee’s work in 2009, I used dance as a metaphor for what she was doing. It’s still apt, but cooking can also be used as a revealing equivalent as Lee herself has described her paintings as looking like cream ladled on cakes. Perhaps words from the kitchen rather than the nursing home will help evoke what Lee does with paint: scoop, dollop and squeeze. The actions we use when making cakes, batter or pudding. It is a delight in materials, their malleability. And, of course, to cook something is often to make a gift or to share: something to eat with friends or relatives. To make a painting is likewise an act of sharing. From Bram Bogart’s paintings of the 1950s onward there has been a tradition of going beyond mere impasto, of painting ultra-thick, of treating paint as substance. Similarly, Lee’s work is about relating to and performing with the material world. Hers too is a material but not necessarily a materialist discourse, as much other
8
thick painting is. Her philosophy is about belonging in a world we did not make— but that we can, if not remake, participate in. Another equivalent for how she plays with paint is the way ceramicists play with clay. Ceramics are the most sensuous of art forms in which, just as with paint, liquid, viscous or malleable materials are shaped by hand. Lee shapes and “throws” paint much as a potter shapes and throws a pot. We need to think of the actions and processes of viscous materials. How would we describe what she does? Adventures in viscosity? To think of paint in terms of bulk and shape inevitably has led her to think of the space around it: negative shape, potential bulk. The three works with holes in the center (Boundless I, II and III, 2016) should, at least for this exhibition, be understood as one installation. Two paintings are placed back to back on either side of a wall that is itself punctured. By piercing the wall, Lee has made it a constituent part of the installation. The wall becomes a device for looking through. Viewable through these conjoined apertures is a third, smaller painting where the eye can be caught in a mirror. However, the mirror brings in not just the eye, but also the face. However elliptically, she is thinking of the world outside and how people behave. She has become aware of how selfie culture is changing the way we are. She remarks, with a smile, “People will like to see their faces appearing in the paintings.” This is not how artists from the conceptual generation, Michelangelo Pistoletto or Art & Language, used mirrors in paintings. Lee is more interested in investigating the viewer’s participation than making a conceptual point about representation. The holes. They are not gunshot wounds—they are not figurative in any specific way. They are things to look through, much as we look through a keyhole or
9
a telescope—embodied in things, paintings, that have become very solid and lumpy. Letting holes in, is to let space in, hence the title she has given these works: Boundless. Boundless suggests infinity or infinite freedom. Ideas and new forms don’t appear out of nowhere: they emerge and are tested and developed. Even before In You, In Me, 2015, she had made a small work with mirrors. Old forms recur: in the past year she has made more Tear and Fetish paintings—two forms she has used for a long time. She tells me her proposed title for the show is Wall Matter. I suggest adding an “s” to Matter to allow for a pun or ambivalence. Wall matters—business to do with the wall and the wall matters. It is important. Lee has been increasingly interested in space and in animating space—as she did in Déjà Vu from 2015 where she spread linked paintings, or painting elements, across three walls, and with Solid Turned Liquid of the same year, which proposed reversing the standard procedure of painting. Lee insists there is no meaning to paint, except perhaps joy. The joy in making and seeing how materials transform. The dance we make with materials. It is very much like the delight we have in reading the words and phrases in such poems as Wallace Stevens’ The Emperor of Ice-Cream. Paint has no meaning, no content—for Lee, just as in meditation, the answer is always back inside you. When I first wrote about her in 20094 she emphasized how important yoga and meditation were to her. She still does yoga daily. Her studio is very different than when she started in 2007 and when I visited two years later. It feels heavier now, firstly because there is an accumulation of
10
past work and experiments, secondly because the new work is denser. Set in a modern industrial unit, it is still clean and well organized. She does not like too many people visiting, distracting and interrupting her work and thoughts. She has begun to think of working at home. Occasionally, now she finds the studio stressful and doesn’t want to be there. I ask whether she works in silence or plays music. She tells me that she likes to listen to hymns, Hindu music or yoga music—and she likes it loud. Sometimes she sings along, or even dances. She tells me that she must keep the joy and playfulness in her work. This is why she is always trying new ways of making: she knows people will be able to tell if working has become a dull routine—the works will feel heavy. Nevertheless, normally she leaves the studio happier than she was when she arrived. Why? Because, she says, she has discovered something. She may come into the studio feeling down, or with a cluttered mind, but once she gets to work, she concentrates. This is like meditation: it feels good. The studio, painting, is not a place of angst for her. It is a place to experiment. It is a place of joy. The calmness that underlays Lee’s earlier work often reminds me of Agnes Martin. But unlike Martin, she does not think about beauty. “Beauty? What does that mean? How do we define it?” she asks. Perhaps how she speaks of joy is not so different from how Martin wrote of beauty. “How much joy can there be?” she ponders. She wants to know how much you can let go. “Urgent” is how she describes the making and filling of holes and cavities in her new paintings, then pulling paint out, excavating it onto other surfaces. Her older work was very slow, very meticulous. She wanted a new way of working.
11
She started by making new supports using high-density foam but they were not stable enough (she feels collectors have a right to something that will last). Hence her decision to make her supports from fiberglass. Initially she made these herself despite the toxicity. But as the supports got larger she has had to enlist others to make them. They never come from the fabricators quite how she wants—a problem Frank Stella also has—but she accepts them as they are and works with them. It is a form of collaboration: you have to respond to what is given to you. When she was a fashion designer, it was, she recollects, the same. The samples were never quite right, never exactly how she designed them. Like a jazz musician, you respond to what is before you: you improvise. What distinguishes Lee’s work is ingenuity, invention and improvisation. Her work has always been witty—using the word in the old way to suggest not so much the comic as the intelligent play of words or forms. In part, this is a reaction against the controlled efficiency of life in technocratic Singapore. On many of these paintings she uses a cooking comb to create parallel ridges (it’s not unlike icing a cake), and then a spatula or her hands to scoop out paint. It is all a matter of collaborating with the material. After making Deep, 2016, for example, she hung it upside down so the pull of gravity would affect the final form as it dried (similarly, Gaudi gave his rooftops an organic feel by hanging the models for them upside down, engaging gravity as a collaborator). I pause in this survey of the discursive nature of her workings. I am still struggling for those few, specific words that give a sense of her practice. No one word does the job of distilling her processes, so I propose a triad to best hint what she does—or allows: “spill,” a deliberate accident; “flow,” allowing paint to be itself; and “throw,” deliberate intervention. But inevitably, these words and phrases remain inadequate: the joy is in the paintings and the space they occupy—or rather in your experience of them.
12
Notes 1 Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982). English translation of 1980 French original. 2 For example, the exhibition catalogue Abject Art produced by the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, in 1994. 3 It carries a wonderful echo of Marshall Berman’s classic book on life in the modern city: All That Is Solid Melts into Air (London, 1982), itself a phrase from Karl Marx. 4 In the catalogue for solo exhibition Prélude à l’après midi d’un faune published by Osage Gallery Hong Kong in 2011. Tony Godfrey has been writing about contemporary art for more than thirtyfive years and has published hundreds of articles. From 1989 to 2008, he was Director of the MA in Contemporary Art at Sotheby’s Institute, London. He was also professor of fine art at the University of Plymouth before moving to Singapore in 2009. Since then, he has worked as a writer and curator with artists from Southeast Asia and China. For three years, he was curator at Equator Art Projects, Singapore and Indonesia. Godfrey’s books include New Image: Painting in the 1980’s (1986), Drawing Today (1991), Conceptual Art (1998) and Painting Today (2009). He has recently co-authored the book Contemporary Photography in Asia and is writing a book on contemporary Indonesian painting.
13
14
Red, 2015, mixed media, 59.9 x 48 x 4 inches/152 x 122 x 10 cm 15
16
Fetish Series DP, 2015, mixed media, 34 x 24.2 x 3.3 inches/86 x 61.5 x 8.5 cm 17
18
Tear Series PP, 2015, mixed media, 23.4 x 73 inches/59.5 x 185.4 cm 19
20
In You, In Me, 2015, acrylic paint, acrylic paste, pigment, epoxy, mirror on wood, 87.4 x 129.9 x 9 inches/222 x 330 x 23 cm 21
22
Solid Turn Liquid, 2015, mixed media on fiberglass canvas and poured enamel, in three parts, dimensions vary with installation 23
24
Portrait #11, 2015, acrylic paint and heavy gel on fiberglass, 40.2 x 40.2 x 2.4 inches/102 x 102 x 6 cm 25
26
Beyond the Canvas, 2016, mixed media on canvas, wood stretcher, fiberglass, 49.2 x 43.3 x 9 inches/125 x 110 x 23 cm 27
Honey, 2016, acrylic paint, heavy gel on fiberglass, 21.7 x 22.4 x 2.4 inches/55 x 57 x 6 cm 29
Déjà Vu, 2015, mixed media, 47.2 x 393.7 x 2 inches/120 x 1,000 x 5 cm 30
31
32
Within a Painting, 2016, mixed media, 40.2 x 40.2 x 2.4 inches/102 x 102 x 6 cm 33
34
Deep, 2016, acrylic paint on canvas, fiberglass, 39.4 x 37.8 x 3 inches/100 x 96 x 7.5 cm 35
WALL MATTERS SUNDARAM TAGORE MADISON AVENUE 10.20-11.19, 2016
37
38
Wall Matters I, 2016, acrylic paint, heavy gel on fiberglass, 70.9 x 59.5 x 3.2 inches/180 x 151 x 8 cm 39
40
Wall Matters II, 2016, acrylic paint, heavy gel on fiberglass, 70.9 x 59.5 x 3.2 inches/180 x 151 x 8 cm 41
Wall Matters III, 2016, acrylic paint, heavy gel on fiberglass, 40.2 x 39.4 x 2.4 inches/102 x 100 x 6 cm 43
44
Boundless I, 2016, acrylic paint, heavy gel on fiberglass, 59.5 x 47.6 x 3.4 inches/151 x 121 x 8.5 cm 45
46
Boundless II, 2016, acrylic paint, heavy gel on fiberglass, 59.5 x 47.6 x 3.2 inches/151 x 121 x 8 cm 47
48
Boundless III, 2016, acrylic paint, heavy gel on fiberglass, 28 x 28 x 4.7 inches/71 x 71 x 12 cm 49
Q+A In the past some of your works would cascade, unfold and almost spill out from their frames. Many of your recent paintings, however, are somewhat more contained in rectangular or square shapes. What inspired this shift? In previous works, I wanted to push the format of painting by eliminating traditional painting elements. For example, I removed wooden stretcher bars or canvases so those works took on an irregular form and shape. My main concern in my latest works is related to explorations of the surface and the internal spaces within and in between the painting object. It is the depth of the painting that I am pushing now, rather than the form. Can you talk further about your exploration of space and the painting’s surface in your new works? During my 2014 solo exhibition 100 Faces, most of the works were white as my process was to extract from painting surfaces. The preconceived notion of painting is of adding paint to canvas, piling up the pigment and impasto. In this case, however, I wanted to explore the act of extraction or subtraction. The earlier paintings also related to the white walls upon which they were hung. That overall body of work gave a sense of a vast empty space within a linear pictorial plane, an idea that is also often emphasized in classical Chinese painting: the concept of negative space being just as important as the painted, or filled in, elements. In 2015 and 2016, I took this idea further by investigating what resides behind this negative space. I explored the essence of the void, the impossible spaces within, between and behind the painting object. I also wanted to look beyond the wall that these works are presented on. Hence you will observe a great deal of interaction between the painting and the wall, in terms of paint dripping and coagulating across canvas and wall surface, or even a hole being punched through the heart of both painting and wall, as though the negative space has expanded beyond the canvas.
51
I believe that everything is somehow related and nothing exists alone. This new exhibition, Wall Matters, aims to show several paintings as a congruent whole. In a way, they are more like an overall painting installation rather than singular works. I also think these works are freer and bolder— qualities that I enjoyed greatly during the process of making them. Your earlier works have drawn parallels to edible confections, due to the sensuality of the surface and your choice of tools. Do these ideas apply to your recent paintings? I am still not quite sure how this comparison arose, but I do have a fun time playing with my paints as if they were cream and somehow edible. Evoking other faculties apart from the visual is important to me. The feeling of handling abstract painting in a different manner from conventional methods, and relating it to sensations from daily life is an exciting part of my practice. You also relate your painting process to meditation. Can you elaborate on this? I have been practicing yoga and meditation daily for several years. Meditation and yoga are not just postures that are separate from my life but they are integrated into my daily routine, which includes my art practice. In meditation, we still our mind and focus on breathing so that our “cluttered mind� ceases to exist and we go into Samadhi (a stage of being where there are no thoughts and you get in touch with your very true nature). It is an inward-looking activity to find your true self. My interest in the search for the essence of painting in my art practice almost mirrors my meditation. In the initial stage of painting, myself and
52
my mind (the “do-er”), the materials, and the painting processes are separated. But when I get deeper into the process of creating art, all the elements—including the painting materials and the “do- er”—become one. I think the process of art making feels like meditation and there is a magic that happens when all ego, self and ideas of the self disappear altogether. You once described paint as a crying child trapped behind the picture plane waiting for his or her potential to be unleashed. Does this metaphor apply to your recent works? Yes. To me painting is very much about the medium, the basic elements (canvas, stretcher, paint) and how the painter deals with them. Paint has a life of its own and these basic components have many stories to tell. I see paint as more than just a medium to use. I feel it has been underutilized and suppressed for a long time such that it hasn’t lived to its fullest potential. It’s almost like a child abiding by their parents’ dreams but not being allowed to pursue what they want. Their souls are crying inside. I believe paint is not just a material with no life; I see life within it. How has your process transformed over the years? Most of my past works have been more craft-driven and meticulous. In recent paintings, I wanted to be freer, become more physical and spontaneous in making art. I continue to enjoy and expand this freedom.
Interview by Payal Uttam, an editor and writer who covers art and culture for CNN, The Wall Street Journal, The Art Newspaper and Artforum, among other international publications.
53
JANE LEE 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.
Photograph © Jane Lee, by Lee Ee Guan
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.
55
56
57
SUNDARAM TAGORE GALLERIES new york new york hong kong singapore
547 West 27th Street, New York, NY 10001 • tel 212 677 4520 • gallery@sundaramtagore.com 1100 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10028 • tel 212 288 2889 4/F, 57–59 Hollywood Road, Central, Hong Kong • tel 852 2581 9678 • hongkong@sundaramtagore.com 5 Lock Road 01–05, Gillman Barracks, Singapore 108933 • tel 65 6694 3378 • singapore@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 and Kieran Doherty
WWW.SUNDARAMTAGORE.COM Text © 2016 Sundaram Tagore Gallery Essay text pp. 7–13 © 2016 Tony Godfrey Photographs and artwork © 2016 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 II, 2016, acrylic paint, heavy gel on fiberglass, 70.9 x 59.5 x 3.2 inches/180 x 151 x 8 cm ISBN: 978-0-9967301-2-9