.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
Jane Lee is considered one of Asia's most exciting and innovative contemporary artists today. Multi-awarded for her innovative use of medium, including the Celeste Prize for Painting in 2011, Lee's abstract works have been showcased extensively in international exhibitions and biennales; and acquired by prominent private collections and institutions, such as the Singapore Art Museum, which holds Status (2009), a monumental wall-installation, within its permanent collection.
Lee subverts the traditional notion of painting, turning the materiality of paint from a merely representational medium into the actual artwork itself. Through layering the paint into a three-dimensional construct which ex tends beyond the canvas plane, Lee engages the surrounding space and extends the physical circumference of viewership. Painting, within Lee's domain, is no longer a flat format, having taken on architectural qualities and sublimating the visual component with lush tactility. Lee's works can be conceived as artistic interventions, reconsidering painting's significance and relevance for contemporary art practice. Through undulating skeins of paint draped lavishly across stretcher frames sans canvas, porous meshes, or caked and hand-pulled blocks, Lee is constantly engineering and manipulating the substantial weight and heft of liquid paint. As it coalesces, Lee shapes this into its final formation, more wall relief than two-dimensional painting.
Fetish P8 (Lot 155) exemplifies Lee's practice, composed through closely adhered circular wedges of paint, which are predominantly a vivid purple in hue. However upon closer inspection, we observe minute specks of colour and black terra formations weaving throughout the pictorial surface. It conveys the impression of planetary maps complete with land and water masses; or constellations within the night sky. Simultaneously the texture is reminiscent of dense weaving, structured like an abstract tapestry. This visual mimesis transforms the experiential quality of Fetish P8, underlining the intents of Lee's overall methodology.
Lee subverts the traditional notion of painting, turning the materiality of paint from a merely representational medium into the actual artwork itself. Through layering the paint into a three-dimensional construct which ex tends beyond the canvas plane, Lee engages the surrounding space and extends the physical circumference of viewership. Painting, within Lee's domain, is no longer a flat format, having taken on architectural qualities and sublimating the visual component with lush tactility. Lee's works can be conceived as artistic interventions, reconsidering painting's significance and relevance for contemporary art practice. Through undulating skeins of paint draped lavishly across stretcher frames sans canvas, porous meshes, or caked and hand-pulled blocks, Lee is constantly engineering and manipulating the substantial weight and heft of liquid paint. As it coalesces, Lee shapes this into its final formation, more wall relief than two-dimensional painting.
Fetish P8 (Lot 155) exemplifies Lee's practice, composed through closely adhered circular wedges of paint, which are predominantly a vivid purple in hue. However upon closer inspection, we observe minute specks of colour and black terra formations weaving throughout the pictorial surface. It conveys the impression of planetary maps complete with land and water masses; or constellations within the night sky. Simultaneously the texture is reminiscent of dense weaving, structured like an abstract tapestry. This visual mimesis transforms the experiential quality of Fetish P8, underlining the intents of Lee's overall methodology.