JANE LEE | RED STATES HONG KONG ARTS CENTRE
FOREWORD I am delighted to welcome Jane Lee to the Hong Kong Arts Centre for her first solo exhibition in Hong Kong.
My heartfelt congratulations to Jane Lee on this wonderful exhibition.
Born, raised and living in Singapore, Jane has become one of that city-state’s leading contemporary artists in ten short years. She started in fashion, but soon realized her passion lay with using her hands and developing innovative techniques to transform paint and canvas, rather than fabric, into works of art that are both painting and sculpture. The results are beautiful and emotionally powerful. In this, her first solo exhibition in Hong Kong, Jane creates a site-specific body of new work that responds to the architectural language of the Hong Kong Arts Centre’s Pao Galleries.
I would also like to congratulate the Hong Kong Arts Centre on its fortieth anniversary. It has indeed been an honor to have served as the institution’s chairman for six wonderful years. Over the past four decades, there have been many achievements and accolades to look back on and reminisce about, but it is the future that is more exciting. The Arts Centre remains a key foundation stone for the contemporary cultural landscape of Hong Kong, encompassing visual arts, preforming arts, film, comics, arts education and public art. This exhibition reaffirms a core value of the Hong Kong Arts Centre, which is to expose the Hong Kong audience to spectacular works of art.
The exhibition’s title—Jane Lee: Red States—lends itself to a variety of interpretations, but most obviously to the predominate spectrum of red in many of the works. It is a dramatic exhibition that showcases the brilliance of Jane’s ability to work with raw materials in new and surprising ways. In 2010, Jane contributed a work to the Hong Kong Arts Centre’s flagship exhibition Popping Up so it is indeed a pleasure for us to welcome her back. I hope with this exhibition, our audience will experience a broader and deeper understanding of her work and recognize her incredible talent.
Finally, I would like to thank the Hong Kong Arts Centre and Tagore Foundation International, co-presenters of this exhibition, and also June Yap, Michelle Ho, Sundaram Tagore, Faina Derman and Jane Lee, without whom this exhibition would not have been possible.
Nelson Leong, Chairman, Board of Governors, Hong Kong Arts Centre March 2018
BEYOND AND BENEATH PAINT: THE STORIES OF CANVAS IN THE WORKS OF JANE LEE MICHELLE HO At its most fundamental, the canvas serves as a base material and foundation for painting. As a support mechanism for the artist’s vision, its fate is to be transformed into images, signs, symbols and the acquired manners of representation accumulating to that which has been known in the histories of painting. Such an understanding of painting assumes, and assigns customary function and meaning to the structures that traditionally uphold the establishment of the painting. It is one that Jane Lee has persistently challenged through the course of her practice, which has sought to unravel conceptions of this medium and its forms: Paintings made without stretchers that nonetheless assert the presence of painting; paint itself slipping away from the painting, collapsing from its frame, at times crossing the medium threshold into sculptural objects, or paintings stacked horizontally that deny the bias and impulse of the gaze toward the surface. Lee, who began her practice in the mid-2000s, is part of a small group of artists in Singapore whose work in painting led to the resurgence of the medium as a critical
force that expanded the possibilities of representation within the genre, particularly at a time when new media and interdisciplinary forms of contemporary art were more prominent in leading art discourse. Red States, this exhibition’s titular work, is an example of how the artist engages with painting techniques and treatments that traverse the realms of sculpture and installation as the artist employs the conventions of these disciplines to question the ontological status of the art objects in question. Made of paint, but not quite painting, the work can be said to emerge from the post-medium condition of contemporary art with artistic practices that examine the constraints of a medium, and the complications surrounding its characteristics in manners that may not necessarily seek to profess a medium’s purity, but employ them as a “supporting structure” for new artistic creation.1 Such incursions by Lee can be seen to fall under what art historian David Joselit has described as a “transitive painting,” where painting’s survival hinges on its ability to operate within shifting contexts of display, circulation and reception, and “its capacity to hold suspension the passages internal to a canvas, and those external to it.”2
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We begin to see this through her works under the series The Story of Canvas, where it is this very base material and foundation of painting—the humble canvas—that has become the main subject matter for Lee. Lee speaks of her approaches with materials using terms such as “extraction,” “separation” and “removal.” However, these strategies of reduction have not led to the dematerialization of paint, or painting, for her interventions tend to produce end results that are sumptuous and visceral, invariably seeming to maintain the primacy of paint itself.3 Because much of the discussion of Lee’s work has often surrounded the question of the paint medium and its materiality, the dimension of her practice that concurrently investigates the potential of the canvas material, through critical principles of distillation that she has continued to prioritize through the course of her career, tended to be overlooked. “The canvas has often been seen as playing a secondary role in painting. There is a part of my practice that has always wanted to find ways of bringing it to the forefront,” says Lee, who as early as 2009, started to reconsider the inversion of the relationship between the materiality of paint and canvas, without relying on the former as a central implement. As she had asserted in another conversation: “There are still a lot of stories to tell… The canvas, and its different thickness; how you roll it, and how its form changes after it stretches… Just from these elements alone, there are so many interesting dimensions to express.”4 This trajectory in her practice seeks to go not just beyond paint, but, quite literally, beneath paint. Unlike her other work processes where paint is applied with a nozzle device, building up layers
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of labyrinthine complications, in The Story of Canvas works, pure acrylic paint is poured over raw canvas, as Lee spreads and rubs it over an entire roll on both sides, using both her hands and a palette knife. By maintaining a stained impression rather than a tactile exterior, she allowed for the subtler traits of the canvas’s absorption of paint to manifest, thereafter cutting the canvas into strips to further accentuate its warp and weft, where paint was to play a supplementary role. Upon entering the exhibition Red States, the visitors’ gaze is drawn to a burgundy field of intertwining canvas threads that encompass the entrance. Follow the thread and one is led to another sight to behold—the source of the material, this time manifested as a four-sided plane on the wall. In as much as it may be tempting for proponents of painting to read this as possibly a logical conclusion of painting’s sovereignty, The Story of Canvas #2 also begs the question: But where, really, is the beginning and the end? Does the medium take lead or does its materials define the former? The ambiguity and self-reflexivity of works such as these are often present in Lee’s other pieces that evade clear definitions of form. She is not interested in how her works are being classified, preferring to be led by a playful approach to materials. This does not contradict the fact that in their complex simplicity, they also correspond to a philosophical awareness, the futility of wanting to conclude what painting is or isn’t. The germinations of this realization can be traced back to Folded Painting, a 2009 work, similarly made of strips
of canvas, wound horizontally back and forth over a fourcornered plane to eventually escape the very frame it envelopes, with an insistence on presenting itself in both a state of construction and unraveling. It is as if canvas wanted to stake its claim as painting proper, while making visible its duty as mere instrument. This desire to imbue the canvas material with agency can also be seen in Purple Blues III, a 2010 work where she has given a canvas three-dimensionality, folding it multitude times into a brilliant density to attain the form of painting.
Folded Painting, 2009
Purple Blues III, 2010
In Stack Up 1 and 2, thousands of miniature squareshaped canvases have been layered above each other to create a sense of towering weightiness, vacillating between the playful and the precarious. By stacking her canvases, Lee denies viewers the instinct to enjoy a canvas’s surface. Instead, it is the increments of the lean slithers of a canvas’s cross section that is visible, intensified by the limitations of the canvas’s width, yet culminating in a resplendent array of shade and shadow. This is another story of canvas that Lee wants us to see—that even the flatness of canvas, as opposed to the physicality of paint, can possess sculptural ambitions. This preoccupation with the potential of the materiality of canvas has been deployed to dramatic effect in works such as Turned Out I and II (2009, 2010), where Lee introduced the gesture of coiling to create large discs made of continuous rolls of canvas strip. The Story of Canvas #1, #1a and #1b emerge as developments from these earlier meditations on canvas, this time created in coiled discs of varying circumferences that connect the larger perimeters of the exhibition space,
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evocative of spools of thread seemingly in spirals of near-infinity. In this exhibition, the artist has presented them in clusters of circles, some of them formed in turn by miniature coils, drawing our attention to the interrelation between parts and wholes where no component is more significant than the other, once again reminding us of her central thesis in The Story of Canvas—that of the enigma of painting’s beginning and end.
Left: Turned Out 1, 2009 Right: Turned Out 2, 2010
Another body of work in this exhibition, Cream Series 1–9, is an example of how Lee’s art tends to tease the tendency toward categorical thinking regarding genre. Procedurally, these works can be seen as an application of paint on plinths. For detractors, these sumptuous blocks of lavish streaks, spills and scratches of acrylic that amass into extravagant assemblages, stand as a pure and unapologetic celebration of paint, nothing more and nothing less. One might hesitate to see them as vulgar because of the breadth of her extensive body of work that has demonstrated how she has arrived at new forms of work through rigorous investigation and experiments that push the capabilities of the materialities of her medium.5 Cream Series 8 and 9 reveal a more transitory instance, with the appearance of stacked canvases melding into a singular entity, almost as if a painting was attempting to escape the wall, rather than harboring a will for monumentality and magnified proportions.
Solid Turned Liquid, 2015
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Lee’s reflections on transitory natures and liminal states of materiality can be seen in Pond Series, a development from her 2015 Solid Turned Liquid installation that explored ideas of liquidity in physicality.
In a departure from her usual treatment of color with verve and vibrancy, both works have been conceived to cast color in a foreboding light to trigger an uneasy sensation of bloodshed and impending violence. Perhaps this prescient translation in Pond Series, with the connotations of conflict and danger through color, although unintended by the artist, harks back to the curatorial premise of the Red States exhibition. Conceived to reference the artist’s penchant for the color red and its symbolic representations, it also alludes to the national colors of Singapore and Hong Kong. In Pond Series, Lee’s signature red coagulates into a heavy pool of impenetrable darkness, with hanging white shrouds appearing like participants (or sacrificial lambs) in an imminent rite of transformation of inevitable change: To raise a sense of emergency in the confronting realities of a society wrought in contention with social and political change, or by the artist’s suggestion, a reference of nature’s cycle taking place in a woman’s body? For Lee, these interpretations are the manifold narratives that can emerge from an artist’s stories of canvas.
Michelle Ho, curator of the retrospective portion of Red States, is gallery director of ADM Gallery, Nanyang Technological University, where she is spearheading a renewed vision of contemporary art, design and media programs, with an emphasis on new media. She has more than ten years of experience in curating Singapore, Southeast Asian and international contemporary art exhibitions, which include Rise and Fall, Ebb and Flow: Works of Jane Lee, In Praise of Shadows, The Art of Conflict: Video Works from the Asia Society Museum Collection (2017); Time of Others (2015–2016) and The Collectors Show: Weight of History. She was also co-curator of the Singapore Biennale 2013. Formerly a curator at the Singapore Art Museum, she has led the acquisition strategies of its contemporary art collection, and was in charge of its Thailand collection. Notes 1. Rosalind Krauss, A Voyage on the North Sea: Art in
2. 3. 4. 5.
the Age of the Post-Medium Condition (Thames & Hudson, London, 2000), 5, 35. David Joselit, “Painting Beside Itself,” October 130, Fall 2009, MIT Press Journal, 128–9. Michelle Ho, Ebb and Flow, Rise and Fall: Works of Jane Lee, Primz Gallery, Singapore, 2017, 8. Conversations with Jane Lee, January 31, 2017 and February 8, 2018. See States in Formation in this exhibition, a documentation of Jane Lee’s early works, study pieces and processes that date back to 2002.
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Fetish Series #Pink, 2017, acrylic paint, heavy gel on fiberglass, 154 x 154 cm
Pond Series, 2017, acrylic paint, heavy gel on fiberglass, pond 194 cm in diameter, 140 cm high overall
Red States, 2017, acrylic paint, heavy gel on fiberglass, wall piece 222 x 306 x 28 cm, floor piece 24 x 315 x 156 cm
The Story of Canvas #1, 2017, acrylic paint, canvas on board, 204 cm in diameter The Story of Canvas #1a, 2017, acrylic paint, canvas on board, 500 cm long as pictured
Stack Up 2, 2017, acrylic paint on canvas on metal base, 179 x 220 cm
Stack Up 1, 2017, acrylic paint on canvas on metal base, 400 cm high
Cream Series 8, 2017, acrylic paint, heavy gel on fiberglass, 92 x 31 x 31 cm
Cream Series 1, 2017, acrylic paint, heavy gel on fiberglass, 101 x 52 x 31 cm
Cream Series 3, 2017, acrylic paint, heavy gel on fiberglass, 131 x 76 x 26 cm
The Story of Canvas #2, 2017, acrylic paint on canvas, acrylic sealant on board, 150 x 77 x 6 cm
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. 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 participated in Frontiers Reimagined, a Collateral Event of the 56th Venice Biennale.
JANE LEE | RED STATES H O N G K O N G A R T S C E N T R E , PA O G A L L E R I E S , 5 / F, 2 H A R B O U R R O A D , W A N C H A I M AY 10 – J U N E 10 , 2 0 18 www.hkac.org.hk | www.tagorefoundationinternational.com | www.nac.gov.sg Text © 2018 Tagore Foundation International Photographs © 2018 Jane Lee Printed in Hong Kong by CA Design 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: The Story of Canvas #1b, 2017, acrylic paint, canvas on board, 590 cm long as pictured ISBN: 978-0-9967301-4-3
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