Exploding Suns

This major exhibition of Lee’s recent work marks her first solo show in Singapore, adding to an impressive exhibition history which includes group and solo exhibitions in Shanghai, Hong Kong, Kuala Lumpur, Japan, Beijing and Australia. The exhibition evokes a sense of deep time and will include new vast paper scroll works, singed and pierced by fire, large-scale flung bronze sculptures and freestanding bronze ‘Fire Stones’.

Time, in Lee’s work, is not the time of ticking clocks but the vast arc of time, phenomenological and experiential time of which we are all participants. Lee invokes this sense of deep time in bronze and works on paper which are innumerably pierced, singed by flame and soaked with water. As every scorched mark stands for an individual moment, the flung bronze works are also a register of a unique instant of time as in the Buddhist practice of flung ink – the absolute mark. So too, the large bronze Fire Stones, borne of the marriage of metal and spontaneous eruptions, speak to the infinite curve of time inherent to all life. They image the cosmos as the entirety of all things, all that has happened and everything that will happen, time endlessly unfurling. The expression of an individual life may seem ineffable in the light of this incomprehensible vastness, yet in their totality, each of our lives is a sentient unit of ontological time. Brought into existence by these remarkable conditions, Lee’s work reminds us of our position in the hugeness of time and the infinity within it.