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Jane Lee: Paint beyond painting

Jane Lee’s huge painting Raw Canvas at the City Hall as part of the 2008 Singapore Biennale caught many people’s attention at the time, but it is her current solo exhibition at Osage Singapore that reveals this artist’s remarkable innovation, using paint as a medium to create works beyond painting

Carla Bianpoen (The Jakarta Post)
Singapore
Thu, October 8, 2009

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Jane Lee:  Paint beyond painting

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ane Lee’s huge painting Raw Canvas at the City Hall as part of the 2008 Singapore Biennale caught many people’s attention at the time, but it is her current solo exhibition at Osage Singapore that reveals this artist’s remarkable innovation, using paint as a medium to create works beyond painting.

When I visited Osage gallery at its exhibition space in the Old School Singapore, just a few hours before the opening, Jane Lee was busy putting the finishing touches on her latest works. The exhibition — the artist’s first major solo show since being awarded the Singapore Art Prize for her work at the Singapore Art Show in 2007 — gives a fairly comprehensive representation of her oeuvre.

Nevertheless, meeting with the artist and her curator helped gain an insight into how Jane started exploring the working of paint beyond painting and how the works in the exhibition came into being.
“Painting became too limited for me, I needed more freedom, more space,” she explained.

Or as her curator Eugene Tan, also the director of programs of the Osage galleries, said, “Jane uses paint in another perspective.”

Jane Lee: JP/Carla Bianpoen

In fact, for Jane Lee the process is more important than the product. Although she uses paint, she pushes painting beyond its usual limits, as she does with the canvas, which transforms from a major element into a medium that is removed in the end stage.

This was the case when she made Plentiful, a work that really appears like a painting from afar, but on closer examination turns out to consist of little pieces of thick paint. To make the work, she had first cut a piece of canvas into little pieces, which she then loaded with swaths of paint. After the paint had dried, she removed it. The little pieces, glued to each other through some chemical process, are thus self-supporting.

In a further evolution, Lee spreads paint over a plate of glass, removes the paint after it has dried, rolls it up as one would roll a cigarette and cuts the roll in little pieces that stretches to endless lengths after being unfurled; these are then “sown” into, or glued onto, a canvas, to create compositions on canvas and form new works of art, as seen in the Fetish series.

Another “technique” is to remove the stretcher from the canvas on which paint had been richly applied, resulting in a sculptural appearance, as in The Purple Drape.

Letting “streams” of thick paint freely flow on the canvas creates yet another effect, sometimes rendering an appearance of poetic flow that could be imagined as a musical composition.

But the large painting dominating the space and titled Status appears like a messy canvas with paint drooping off.

“This is what’s happening to painting today,” explains the artist.

As the curator’s introduction notes, “By making the painting’s processes and materials the work’s subject, Lee’s paintings question painting’s ability to offer a valid and relevant perspective about the world, and to represent the real world.

Plentiful by Jane Lee
Plentiful by Jane Lee

“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.”

Jane Lee’s art is not confined to exploring and “trespassing” the boundaries of painting to re-examine painting for contemporary practice; it also travels to other spaces, although her fascination with color and texture as a means of visual communication remains.

This is seen in her 8.5 x 5 meter site-specific installation at Bartley Station, The Coin Mat, which features 160,000 one-cent coins, to mark the historical and heritage values of the now discontinued coppers; the aim is to create public awareness of how coins are commonly used but also commonly overlooked.

Jane Lee was born in Singapore in 1963. She graduated from Lasalle-SIA College of the Arts with a BA in Fine Arts and a Diploma in Fashion. She has participated in a number of notable exhibitions in the region and was the recipient of the Singapore Art Prize in 2007

— Photos by Carla Bianpoen

 

Jane Lee’s Solo Exhibition

Until Nov. 8
Osage Singapore
11B Mt Sophia, #01-12, Singapore
Tel: +65 6337 9909
info@osagegallery.com

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