RESIDUAL: Lee Wen & Jason Wee
15 September - 15 October 2023
Block 7, 1st Floor, Gillman Barracks
Curated by Karin Oen
The Institutum presents RESIDUAL: Lee Wen & Jason Wee, an exhibition that revisits the artworks and art practice of Lee Wen (1957-2019) through the lens of his friendship and artistic kinship with Jason Wee (b. 1979), a fellow artist and convener of the art community in Singapore. Curated by Karin Oen, the project offers a profound exploration of artistic friendship and kinship between the two artists. In 2013, Lee Wen invited Wee to join him at the Contemporary Art Japan Artist-in-Residence programme in Saitama, where they shared living and working space for a month.
Although Lee Wen had long standing personal and artistic connections to Japan, this artistic residency was a space away from the familiar, and provided both artists with the opportunity to focus on their separate practices in a new location. They connected through daily rituals including writing, drawing, and performative practices, as well as the practical aspects of cohabitation and navigating the world in a place where neither was fully fluent or at home. After the CAJ residency, Lee Wen and Wee remained close friends and confidantes, realising two exhibitions at Wee’s space Grey Projects, and extending a collaboration around the printed word that began in Saitama to Boring Donkey Songs (2017), an anthology of Lee’s late writings accompanied by responses from younger artists and writers.
Comprising elements of Lee Wen’s multidisciplinary practice that tie into the CAJ residency period, including journals, drawings, paintings, poetry, and performances that were later realized in public venues, the exhibition honours the largely private, constructive space of an artists’ residency as the counterpart to other, more public and collective components of Lee Wen’s artistic work, including the Independent Archive and The Future of Imagination.
To reside in this way is, for both artists, to put some distance from existing habitations of home and country in order to make room for thinking and making; this often imply extend periods of solitude, but with Wen’s invitation to Wee a residency becomes a time for two people to reflect on forms of kindred relations which encompass friendship, whilst fostering both proximities and disaffinities.
Jason Wee’s artistic contributions include sculptures like ...What Kind Of Futures Can We Imagine...(2021), embedded with coded transcriptions of his poetry. These recent works relate to the centrality of writing and language in his art – an aspect of art practice that he and Lee Wen shared in common.
This exhibition features works by and about Lee Wen that have previously not been seen in Singapore, and would not have been possible without the kind permission of the artist Satoko Lee, who now shepherds Lee Wen’s estate. In addition to creating space to explore Lee’s artwork and his influential ideas on artistic intimacies and affiliations, this project seeks to elicit thoughts on the many and multiple roles that artists play for one another - as simultaneously performer and listener, as critics and counterpoints, as conveners and intermediaries, and as friends.
RESIDUAL: Lee Wen & Jason Wee, 2023, Lee Wen, Jason Wee. Image courtesy of The Institutum. Photography by Jonathan Tan.
LEE WEN (1957-2019) was a pioneer among a generation who defined and shaped performance art in Asia. Together with some of his Singapore peers, Lee reimagined the foundations of academic art, opening its vocabulary and techniques to a socially engaged practice. In 1989 he joined The Artists Village (TAV) founded by Tang Da Wu. With his peers he worked in and shaped an environment that fostered conversation and work that was ephemeral, time-based, process-focused, and collectively and socially informed. A year after joining TAV, Lee studied at City of London Polytechnic from 1990 to 1992, and finished his Master of Fine Arts at LASALLE in 2006.
Parallel to his practice as a solo artist, Lee was active in artist-run initiatives—in particular the collective Black Market International, the festivals Future of Imagination (FOI) and Rooted In The Ephemeral Speak (R.I.T.E.S.), and his artist-run space the Independent Archive. He co-founded FOI in 2003 and founded the Archive in 2012, the Archive being one of his last major projects. Formerly named the Independent Archive & Resource Center, the institution consists of a reference library and a collection of archival material pertaining to art in Singapore and its surrounds. He received the Cultural Medallion in 2005.
JASON WEE (b. 1979) is an artist and a writer. He founded and runs Grey Projects, an artists’ library and event space. Through Grey Projects, he explores organizing as an artistic principle, producing Singapore’s islandwide open studio self-guided art tour ‘Walk Walk Don’t Run’. He is the author of three poetry collections, including An Epic of Durable Departures, a Singapore Literature Prize 2020 finalist, and the Gaudy Boy Poetry Prize finalist In Short, Future Now (Sternberg Press, 2020). He is represented by Yavuz Gallery.
KARIN OEN is a curator and art historian based in Singapore where she is Senior Lecturer and Head of the Department of Art History at NTU’s School of Humanities. She works on historical, modern, and contemporary creative practices related to the transcultural and the transmediatic. Recently, Karin was Deputy Director of Curatorial Programmes at NTU CCA Singapore and co-editor with Ute Meta Bauer and Tan Boon Hui of the 2022 book SEA: Contemporary Art in Southeast Asia, commissioned by the Institutum and published by Weiss Publications, Berlin. Karin is a graduate of Stanford University (BA), Christie’s (MA), and MIT (PhD).