Sundaram Tagore is pleased to present new work by Jane Lee, one of Singapore’s most noted contemporary artists. She is best known for her highly tactile and sensuous paintings, which are often dimensional enough to be considered wall-based sculptures. This is Lee’s first solo presentation in New York since Beyond, her critically acclaimed New York debut at Sundaram Tagore Chelsea in 2012.
At the core of her practice, Jane Lee challenges conventional notions of what constitutes a painting, delving deeply into the materiality of paint and structural form. In her latest works, she explores concepts of negative space and the interplay between the paintings and wall surfaces. Walls are important to Lee—not just as a backdrop or barrier but as an activating space. With Wall Matters, she considers the total environment of an artwork rather than restricting herself to the physical limitations of a single canvas plane.
Some of the paintings appear to melt or implode, sliding off their whitewashed supports. In the group of paintings titled Boundless, Lee punches through the heart of artworks mounted back-to-back on a freestanding wall, leaving a crater-like void through the center. Viewers peer through this portal to view a miniature gem of a painting across the room. Lee has integrated a mirror into an aperture of that painting, creating the possibility of incorporating the viewers themselves into the finished work.
Sundaram Tagore Gallery will be showing additional new work by Jane Lee in a solo presentation at Art Basel Hong Kong in March 2017.
Lee has won numerous awards, including a Celeste Prize for painting in 2011. In 2015, Lee’s work was selected for Prudential Singapore Eye, one of the largest surveys of Singapore’s contemporary art to date, 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, a Collateral Event of the 56th Venice Biennale. She lives and works in Singapore.
Jane Lee has a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from LASALLE College of the Arts in Singapore. She has participated in numerous exhibitions in museums and galleries in Asia and Europe, among them the Hong Kong Arts Centre and the Contemporary Art Centre in Vilnius, Lithuania. Her most recent solo exhibition was at the Singapore Tyler Print Institute (Freely, Freely, 2016), following a residency in 2015.
A catalogue with an essay by Tony Godfrey accompanies the exhibition. Godfrey is the author of Painting Today (Phaidon Press, 2009), a comprehensive overview of contemporary painting that features more than forty contemporary artists, including Jane Lee.
Jane Lee is also featured in the newly released publication Vitamin P3: New Perspectives in Painting, Phaidon Press’s authoritative global survey of contemporary painting. The book highlights 108 international painters who are broadly considered to be the brightest lights in the medium today.
