Exhibited:
Espace Louis Vuitton, Landscape Memories, Louis Vuitton
Island Maison, Singapore, April 25 - September 30, 2013

ABOUT THE WORK

In Déja Vu, Singapore-based visual artist Jane Lee presents memories as fragmented patchworks, with some lingering in our subconscious and others embedded right at the center of our consciousness. Here, the artist presents the vastness of human memory; how our brain sometimes plays with our implicit memories, thus producing evocative sensations and a peculiar feeling of familiarity related to how we process and recall memories of certain people, things, and events. This piece is part of a group exhibition featuring works of leading contemporary Singaporean artists titled Landscape Memories at Espace Louis Vuitton Singapore in 2013. The show was also the first of its kind—it was exclusively dedicated to contemporary Singaporean art. Lee displays the expanse of space and how it can be turned into something that would animate the composition. The artist turns the art of painting into a three-dimensional visual spectacle. Déja Vu further exhibits Lee’s unbridled artistic practice; she is unhampered by conventional/traditional techniques in painting. In a 2016 interview with Art Republik, Singapore’s premier art quarterly magazine, Lee said: “I am very much a hands-on person. When I first started painting the traditional way, I planned a lot and would sit down and create compositions for my works. This all changed in 1999 when I went to London to find out more about contemporary art. I attended a workshop where the lecturer threw paint on paper on the floor and instructed the class to just play. That was an eye-opener for me. And that became what I wanted to do. I had come to realize that by the time I planned everything, there would really be no life in the work. I began to go more with my instincts and to play.” Lee‘s works also appease more to the psyche rather than the intellect. In the same interview, the artist shared: “I suppose an artwork can never really be finished. If a work speaks to me, it is done. It is more emotional than intellectual. I talk to my painting a lot. It is an interactive process. Paintings are in a way alive even though they do not talk. They have certain tendencies. There is some kind of negotiation going on between the artist and the work in the process of making art. “Daily life is my source of inspiration, whether it is from a morning walk or in a conversation with someone. Things I see around me, what people say – these are the small things that are my sources of inspiration.” Jane Lee is one of Singapore’s most prominent and soughtafter visual artists. She is also a multi-awarded artist, having received several prestigious honors. Lee was a finalist for the 2007 Sovereign Asian Art Prize and was the first recipient of the Singapore Art Exhibition International Residency Prize in the same year. In 2011, she received a Celeste Prize for Painting. Lee has participated in numerous Asian, North American, and European exhibitions. This includes the Hong Kong Arts Center, the Museo di Palazzo Grimani in Venice, the Sundaram Tagore Gallery in New York, and the Contemporary Art Center in Vilnius, Lithuania. Lee is a pride not only of her home country but of the entire Southeast Asian region as well. (A.M.)