Rise and Fall, Ebb and Flow: Works of Jane Lee

A lingering paradox resides at the heart of Jane Lee’s works. Lee’s paintings almost always begin as a deconstruction of the genre. Denied the typical qualities of painting such as narrative or pictorial matter, they are yet unfailingly imbued with the presence of Painting’s ultimate objecthood. Lee works with great precision to manoeuvre her materials, while relying on intuition to determine how paint itself materialises. Because the end product of her works often result in sumptuous aesthetic experiences, it may sometimes be difficult to see the artistic impulses based on a working process that tethers between chance and control. 

In Lee’s works, painting has been imbued with tactile qualities that dramatically push the medium into the threshold of the three-dimensional realm. Other times, works have been conceived to blend into site and space, putting forth the possibility that painting could well be a multi-dimensional experience. The significance of her works lie in how they operate within these ambiguous zones of sensory and spatial perceptions, leading to what Fumio Nanjo has identified about the essence of Lee’s work “to be found in between the 2nd and 3rd dimensions.”

We see in this exhibition how Lee’s understanding of the nature of her materials, or as she says, “letting cause and effect in painting to happen”, is based on a fundamental awareness of, and adeptness with the medium’s possible states of flux that in turn, allows her to find new modes of expression. 

The exhibition Rise and Fall, Ebb and Flow, demonstrates this recurring process that is at the heart of her work. Formed by a selection of works from the Albert Lim and Linda Neo collection, they chart Lee’s investigation into the inner world of painting: the inherent nature of paint; both constant and mutable, its innate capacity to transform, its rise and fall, ebb and flow, and that which continues to hold infinite possibilities for her art-making.  

Browse the catalogue here.