In her work The Seamless Tomb, currently on show at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney, artist Lindy Lee replicates a black-and-white family photograph from the mid-40s: it shows her heavily pregnant mother, older brother and father, just before her dad left China for Australia — not knowing when he'd see his family again.
Because of Australia's immigration restrictions, known as the White Australia Policy, only one member of their family was allowed into the country — which meant they couldn't see each other again until nearly a decade later, when the artist's mum and two brothers were finally accepted into Australia.
Lee was born soon after, in 1954, in Brisbane.
Speaking to the ABC ahead of the opening of her major solo exhibition Moon in a Dew Drop, at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA), Lee says: "The White Australia Policy was at the heart of my work."
"It was telling me that my difference was not acceptable. And that is an excruciating place to live in."
As the only Asian kid at her school, she was stunned when the mother of a longstanding friend told her: "I think you should go out with your own kind."
When Lee started making art four decades ago, she thought her "own kind" were European Masters: she used photocopies of works by El Greco, Jan van Eyck and Titian as the basis of her own artworks, painting over them. As she ran the artists' prints through the photocopier at Sydney College of the Arts, where she was studying, they degraded with every reproduction.
She felt a "ker-thunk" in her gut when she realised what she was doing.
"It's in the flaws of the copy that we find who we are," she says. "The copies are like me ... I'm such a crap copy of China. I'm never going to be Chinese. And I'm a crap copy of Australia."
She didn't neatly fit in anywhere — and recognising this was liberating.
She wasn't the blonde surfie Australian stereotype, and hadn't lived through the Cultural Revolution like a 'true' Chinese person; instead she'd find her own way. This happened in 1995: she travelled to Beijing to study calligraphy, only to pick up the brush and realise it felt "wrong", Lee recalls.
"I'm holding 4000 years of history — it's not my history."
When Lee began flicking ink totally unbound by rules, though, that felt right to her.
"All conditions come together to make that mark," she says. "I love that as a piece of poetry."
In doing so, Lee was paying tribute to the ancient Chinese art of flung-ink painting: Buddhist monks would meditate first, then splash ink as an expression of that meditation — a distillation of that moment in the universe.
Buddhism helped the artist accept her Chinese roots. No Up, No Down, I Am The Ten Thousand Things — her ultra-colourful installation from 1995 — was her first artwork to reflect this. It evokes the idea that you're the accumulation of 10,000 things, rather than an individual self.
Buddhism led to her bronze sculptures, which resemble flung-ink paintings, too. Except she uses 1,200-degree molten liquid that burns through to the bone, instead of traditional ink.
It requires wearing a hazmat suit because the process is so dangerous. "It's terrifying, but it's so much fun," she says.
Lee makes these pieces at Urban Art Projects' studio in Brisbane, with help from on-site workers. They start by dipping a giant ladle into the molten bronze, then resting it onto sand.
Lee picks it up with great care. The ladle is incredibly heavy — it carries up to 15 kilos of hot bronze.
"You have to be absolutely present, otherwise you could do some serious damage," she says.
The ladle's weight will dictate her posture or sway, and how she should direct the bronze. In this way, the flung-bronze works — like her rain-weathered scrolls, or burnt metal works — are left open to chance, or the whim of the universe.
"It has nothing to do with me," she says.
But Lee's ingenuity is what makes it possible. Her large-scale bronze sculptures come from her experiments with floating melted lead in custard. She originally considered pouring molten bronze into cold water, to see how it naturally re-formed — but backtracked once a foundry worker told her this would cause an explosion and wipe out the suburb.
Two standout works have been created for the MCA show, which is curated by museum director Elizabeth Ann Macgregor, and was originally scheduled for July. A three-month delay, caused by the pandemic, became an advantage — particularly in the case of Moonlight Deities, which features gigantic, perforated paper screens that cast mesmerising shadows, have a meditative effect and reflect a Buddhist sense of time.
Moonlight Deities took six months to make. Some parts were bigger than Lee's Byron Bay studio and needed reformatting to get through the doors. "So they had to be sectioned [off] and sewn together," she says.
The other major new work is Secret World of a Starlight Ember: a stainless steel sculpture that sparkles with 100,000 perforations.
Sitting on the MCA forecourt, with the harbour and Opera House behind it, the sculpture was also challenging to install: it weighs a tonne and is supported by a four-tonne plinth.
"We had to close the road to get the crane in," says Macgregor. "There were moments when the crane got cancelled and we had to un-cancel it." Three different authorities needed sign-off on the installation. "I said to them: we're not building a house, we just want to put a sculpture on the forecourt."
Creating the pricks of light that cause the work to sparkle was a headache. With previous, similar works (including The Life of Stars, a six-metre-high sculpture outside the Art Gallery of South Australia), Lee travelled to China to work with a specialist fabrication team there, hand-marking the holes.
COVID-19 required Lee do this remotely, using a polystyrene model and stamping on 100,000 perforations with an ink pad — only to discover the ink would smudge and need to be redone. Lee's team also had to scan the model, digitise it, send it to China, and quality-check the many dots over FaceTime.
"It's just as well that we had longer," says Macgregor.
Moon in a Dew Drop chronicles how Lee has dealt with her "divided self", caught between her Chinese and Australian identities.
Having multiple cultural identities caused heartache when growing up — now it helps her reach the world with her work, from an upcoming commission for New York's Chinatown, to the banners she made for the Australian embassy in Beijing, which feature the faces of her family members.
Living with multiple viewpoints has become "a marvellous gift", she says.
Lindy Lee: Moon in a Dew Drop is showing at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, until February 28.
https://news.google.com/__i/rss/rd/articles/CBMibmh0dHBzOi8vd3d3LmFiYy5uZXQuYXUvbmV3cy8yMDIwLTEwLTA4L2xpbmR5LWxlZS1jaGluZXNlLWF1c3RyYWxpYW4taWRlbnRpdHktYnVkZGhpc3QtbWNhLWFydC1leGhpYml0LzEyNzM4OTEy0gEnaHR0cHM6Ly9hbXAuYWJjLm5ldC5hdS9hcnRpY2xlLzEyNzM4OTEy?oc=5
2020-10-07 20:01:00Z
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