JANE LEE

One of Southeast Asia’s most respected artists, Lee rose to international acclaim when she exhibited her monumental installation Raw Canvas—composed of strands of paint layered into a thick tapestry—at the 2008 Singapore Biennale curated by Fumio Nanjo. Last year, her work was the subject of a major solo exhibition including large, immersive works at the Singapore Art Museum.

Lee is known for laboriously building up multiple layers of paint that coalesce into intricate, dense, sculptural expanses that often drip over edges or explode beyond the picture plane. Recently, however, she has begun exploring a simpler, subtractive approach inspired by her interest in Zen Buddhism and notions of emptiness (sunyata). ‘I started thinking about how I could minimise and remove rather than keep adding,’ she says, referencing a desire for simplicity in both her approach to her art and her life.

In this new work, Lee used various fibreglass supports to create an illusion of depth. Often undulating in form with chasms several centimetres deep, the material creates a dimensional terrain upon which she adds a few thick coats of acrylic paint which she then manipulates with her bare hands, creating gouges, crevices and fissures.

While Lee’s early works were focused primarily on formal concerns surrounding the physical components of a painting, the work in this exhibition stems from more philosophical concerns. Lee was guided by the Heart Sutra, the Mahayana Buddhist text that states ‘form is emptiness,’ that our physical, observable reality is ultimately empty and temporary. Abandoning the vivid colours of her earlier work, she simplified her palette, working primarily in black and white. The contrast between positive and negative space highlights the interplay between form and emptiness. Moreover, by puncturing the surface of her works and scraping away paint, she gives material shape to the Buddhist concept of ‘piercing the veil of illusion.’

Teaching that no thing in the world has ultimate substantiality (no thing is), the Heart Sutra’s closing invocation, gate gate paaragate paarasamgate bodhi svaha (gone, gone, gone to the other shore; gone completely to the other shore. Svaha), describes the experience of enlightenment through relinquishing all attachments—material, conceptual and otherwise.

For the first time, Lee has also embedded fragments of Chinese ink paintings on rice paper into her work. Glimmers of mineral green and rich blue from these ink paintings are visible amid dense monochromatic swaths of paint. She has long been fascinated with the ethereal compositions and philosophy underpinning shan shui (traditional Chinese landscape) paintings. By including these fragments Lee asserts her own complex cultural identity within the context of Western abstract painting traditions.

The exhibition culminates in the installation No Sense Is, 2023, featuring a large white painting mounted on the floor, from which a narrow strip has been sliced and suspended. Upon peering down onto the painting, viewers will discover an embedded mirror. ‘We feel as if our five senses are so real, when we look at the world through our eyes it looks so solid. But according to the Heart Sutra, our five senses are actually nothing,’ says Lee. ‘Our whole world exists because of our thoughts in our mind.’ By adding the mirror, she invites viewers to literally reflect and embark on an inner journey not unlike her own.

ABOUT JANE LEE****

Jane Lee first gained critical acclaim when her monumental work Raw Canvas was showcased at the 2008 Singapore Biennale. Her work was then featured at 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. 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, at the 56th Venice Biennale.

In 2018, Raw Canvas was prominently hung at the National Gallery Singapore and Jane Lee: Red States, a critically acclaimed solo exhibition, was held at the Hong Kong Arts Centre. Lee has completed two residencies at STPI (Singapore Tyler Print Institute), 2016 and 2020. In 2023, her work was showcased in an immersive solo exhibition titled Lila: Unending Play by Jane Lee at the Singapore Art Museum.

Jane Lee lives and works in Singapore