李綾瑄

新加坡，Osage 畫廊，「李綾瑄作品個展」，2009年9月26日至11月8日

The work is in good condition overall. Any consistency is due to the artist's working method. Unframed, on a Stretcher.
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The Italian Renaissance grappled with contentious debates regarding the merits of painting versus those of sculpture in order to determine which art form could better emulate nature. While the sculptor could inherently provide a three-dimensional quality to his art, the painter could effectively model light and shade in order to offer the impression of relievo. Regardless, visual art posed a dominion over all the art forms, as the eye was the “primary way in which the sensory receptacle of the brain may more fully and magnificently contemplate the infinite works of nature."¹

Jane Lee solves this Renaissance dilemma by reinventing the treatment of these two classic mediums. This young and rapidly emerging artist studied fine art and fashion at the LASALLE College of the Arts in Singapore. Since then, she has exhibited her works in numerous museums and galleries spanning Asia and Europe, including the Singapore Art Museum, the Hong Kong Arts Center and the Contemporary Art Centerin in Vilnius, Lithuania. Hailed as one of Singapore’s leading contemporary artists, she ruminates and scrutinizes the traditional concept of painting, casting it under a fresh and innovative light. This inventive thinker deconstructs the components of conventional paintings; the flat surface of the canvas, rigid stretcher bars and fixed layers of paint. Realizing that these constituents may function in various new ways, Lee wraps painted strips of canvas around her stretcher bars in order to create the present lot.

With the liberty to build an entity with the exact fundamentals that make up a typical painting, this artist fashions novel works that verge on the sculptural. She dexterously proposes versatile possibilities within prosaic mediums that have been utilized by artists for centuries. An equilibrium between movement and stillness, Folded is securely mounted to a wall while the canvas layers appear precariously fastened, moving lightly with the air and giving in to gravity. The effect of this ambiguous work is tactile and sensuous, resulting in a different aesthetic experience.

As explained by Eugene Tan in the Art Asia Magazine: 
“By making the painting’s processes and materials the very subject of the work, Lee’s paintings question painting’s ability to offer a valid and relevant perspective about the world, to represent the real world. Instead, by ‘representing’ the processes of their construction, her paintings draw attention to the ambiguity of representation, and allude to a new model of representation, one that takes as its starting point, the tools, materials, techniques and processes implicated in the representational strategy.”²

¹Martin Kemp, 1981, p. 209 (Ash. II, 19r)

²Eugene Tan, Art in Asia Magazine, No.10, March - April 2009