The Institutum project exploring friendship and artistic kinship
By Karin Oen

‘RESIDUAL: Lee Wen & Jason Wee’, 2023, exhibition view at 7 Lock Road, Singapore. Photo by Jonathan Tan. Image courtesy of The Institutum.

I have always said that visual arts is a very individualistic practice… At the same time, I feel the need for creative connection with other people, and I believe in the idea that art-making is for the community and not only for myself…

In the past, as an emerging artist, I look to work with experienced artists and now that I am more experienced, I look to work with younger artists…*

-Lee Wen, 2012

The art practice of Lee Wen (1957-2019) entangled with his life, his family relationships, his friendships, his writing, and his lyrical approach to music, storytelling, and community-building. He incorporated his self-proclaimed “dire lack of interest in polish or skill whether in drawings or words”** with lifelong commitments to drawing, poetry, painting, and singing alongside his abiding interest in the medium of performance. While best known for his critical public interventions, iconic performance series, and collaborations with artists in Singapore and around the world, this exhibition celebrates practices from other corners of his artistic web. It explores and expands the space of his 2013 Contemporary Art Japan artists’ residency shared with Jason Wee (b.1979), where each artist was simultaneously writer and reader, performer and audience, critic and confidante.

The invitation by Wen to Jason to join him in this residency was not exactly a natural or expected one - the two artists were not collaborators or close friends prior to this experience. But perhaps their separate social spheres and distinct approaches to art making contributed to what the time together meant for both of them. According to Wee, the CAJ residency provided routine and opportunity for a balance of spontaneity and disciplined studio practice, rehearsal and performance - Wen would find a weekly opportunity to perform for an audience of one, Jason - and a spectrum of interactions with Lee - from endearing to bitingly sarcastic, from sharp commentary on the art world to the confessional.

Lee Wen, ‘freedom to day dream, mothers of imagination’ (three of a series of five), 2007, acrylic on colour photographs. Photo by Jonathan Tan. Image courtesy of The Institutum.

Taking the interstitial space of the residency as a mode of framing each artist’s work, this exhibition includes material from both before and long after the residency itself. Lee’s work includes early sketchbooks and notebooks, painted photographs from his 2007 ‘Freedom to Daydream, Mothers of Imagination’ series, and several late drawings and paintings. Some are densely filled with Lee’s writing and imagery connected to his art, life, and friends. Some are unfinished works. One painting was created, like several of his late works, with the assistance of the artist Liu Wen Chao, after Lee’s illness prevented him from painting by his own hand. Videos of performances by Lee, Wee, and Saitama collaborators Akiyama Yotukutaishi and Koji Iijima were realised at CAJ. Photographs by Wee capturing Lee’s performative explorations also invoke the actual period of residency.

Two books published by Grey Projects, one by each artist, provide a glimpse of their later interactions, synergies, and continued close connection. Boring Donkey Songs (2017) by Lee Wen was edited by Wee and accompanied by responses from younger artists and writers. An Epic of Durable Departures (2018) by Jason Wee comprises poems that borrow from the Japanese literary forms of renga and haiku, coloured with grief, offering an extended farewell to a friend enduring a disabling illness.

Jason Wee, ‘Labyrinths’ (against the wall), 2017, galvanised steel, wool. Photo by Jonathan Tan. Image courtesy of the artist and Yavuz Gallery.

Jason Wee’s paintings and sculptures, including ‘Self Portrait, Pronated’ (2018) and ‘Self Portrait, Spillage’ (2018), two surreal figural watercolours on canvas, in a series of self-portraits made the years following the CAJ residency, take on a distinctly different tone from Lee’s works: deliberate, paced, and enigmatic. The constrained material vocabulary of his sculptural installations – metal fixtures rendered organic through the overlay of woven fibres or knotted cords – creates a conversation between form and space that is beguiling, austere, sophisticated, and puzzling.

Wee’s prose and poetry, explicit in An Epic of Durable Departures and his spoken contributions to CAJ-AIR Performance Session Vol. 5 (2013), becomes implicit in ‘Labyrinths’ (2017). In this work, words suffer the tense absence of key letters, installed on a white metal barricade turned on its side – an instrument of public spatial control de-naturalised by Wee’s minimalist interventions. In ‘…What Kind Of Futures Can We Imagine…’ (2021) and ‘...above the far ships…’ (2023) poems have been transcribed into a series of knots based on the dots and dashes of Morse code. In these recent works, Wee's ongoing attention to carefully composed colours, a juxtaposition of textures, and an oblique relationship with words, results in a purposeful and inviting illegibility. Wee’s exploration of circumscription and contradiction can also be seen ten years prior in his opening words at the CAJ-AIR Performance Session Vol. 5, “We are here to spend time with each other. But why talk? Why not silence, instead?”

Jason Wee, ‘Lee Wen, Conference with a Leaf’ series, 2013/2023, inkjet prints. Photo by Jonathan Tan. Image courtesy of the artist and The Institutum.

The display at the rear of the gallery assembles a diverse group of material, including two videos documenting performances in Saitama. In one of these performance videos, we see Wee’s photographs from the ‘Lee Wen, Conference with a Leaf’ series installed on the walls of the gallery in which Wen’s performance takes place – the only time these photos have been shown prior to this exhibition. Two of Lee’s songs, including one from the Anyhow Blues Revival series, acknowledge this important part of his performance practice. Two videos connected to the 2005 award of Singapore’s Cultural Medallion showcase some of the reasons why Lee Wen was honoured alongside his humble, humorous, and slightly irreverent acceptance speech.

Centred on Lee’s and Wee’s friendship and the creative experimentation and incubation that can thrive in the space of an artists’ residency, this exhibition also recognises the labour of artistic community-building and the many stresses and compromises of real life as a practising artist. As Lee noted on the occasion of his 2012 Singapore Art Museum exhibition ‘Lee Wen: Lucid Dreams in the Reverie of the Real’, “my journey seems to have been marked by ambivalent points between arrivals and departures; fraught more with anxieties than triumphant successes.” In the same essay, he shared a vivid memory and connection to the prized possession of his childhood, a book filled with colourful children’s paintings. “...It was a special, magical book of influence that revealed a kaleidoscopic world of dreams, stories, and adventures… Even without its physical presence, its memory is enough to hold on to and to keep faith in those secrets of spiritual possibilities.” He continued:

Artists and other agents of change administer, actualise, and advocate change by focused inquiries, recommending syntheses and reconciliations of contradictory situations or solutions. We must allow openness and freedom for impossible dreams for ours is an odyssey that changes over time. We confront many complex oceans of meaning, familiar yet unknown that require constant review, reinvention, and renewal of our social ethos, like the Argo, if we are ever to survive the doomsday soothsayers.**

He finished the essay with a poem and a drawing.

“Centred on Lee’s and Wee’s friendship and the creative experimentation and incubation that can thrive in the space of an artists’ residency, this exhibition also recognises the labour of artistic community-building and the many stresses and compromises of real life as a practising artist. ”

Karin Oen’s curatorial essay is published on the occasion of ‘RESIDUAL: Lee Wen & Jason Wee’, organised by The Institutum. The show is on view from 15 September to 15 October 2023 at 7 Lock Road, Singapore.

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Notes
* Excerpted from “Coffee with Lee Wen: an artist interview,” a conversation with Khairuddin Hori, published in Lee Wen and Singapore Art Museum. 2012. Lee Wen: Lucid Dreams in the Reverie of the Real. Singapore: Singapore Art Museum.
**Lee Wen, “life as dream as art as life,” in Lee Wen: Lucid Dreams in the Reverie of the Real. Singapore: Singapore Art Museum.