Jane Lee: Dancing With The Cosmos

Arndt Art Agency (A3) is pleased to present a curated solo artist project by Singaporean artist Jane Lee during Asia Now, Paris in October 2022 (Booth G08).

Singapore artist Jane Lee is widely recognised for her monumental works which blur the lines between painting and sculpture, and challenge preconceptions about what painting can be. Relinquishing her training in academic conventions of painting, Lee sought to find her own voice by exploring the deconstruction of painting’s material constituents—stretcher, frame, canvas, and the medium of paint itself—in order to arrive at what she calls painting’s “essence”. In her critically acclaimed, site-responsive works such as Raw Canvas and Status, paint is liberated from a purely representational function and serves both as “frame” and “canvas”; these iconic works transcend conventional categories of painting, sculpture and installation with their resplendent dimensionality.

Painting’s materiality and processes have always been central to Lee’s work. However, Lee’s practice has shifted in tandem with her unfolding artistic journey, and this is reflected in how she approaches painting as both object and process. Her earlier work was laboriously created by repeatedly layering skeins of paint, in order to build up their dense and variegated surfaces. In recent years however, Lee has approached painting with a far more spontaneous spirit, choosing to work directly on its surfaces with her bare hands, and removing—rather than adding—paint in order to create her work. These pieces bear marks of the artist’s movements and deliberations, their expressive surfaces recording traces of Lee’s gouging, scooping, pushing, flicking, raking, and scraping. The energy of this tactile play—by turns explosive and sensuous, but also subtle and intimate—is writ large on their surfaces, which at times evoke landscapes, or landforms shaped by elemental forces.

In titling this series of work created for Asia Now, Lee references ideas about a “New Earth”, the dawn of a new era of consciousness heralded by the Age of Aquarius, a period said to be distinguished by the flourishing of artistic and creative endeavours as the old world order gives way to new ideas. In the same vein, her works seek to explore a contemporary spirit and approach to the age-old medium of painting – one that is characterised by exploration, transformation, and play, in its quest to understand painting’s essential nature. —Tan Siuli, independent curator