“I believe all things have lives of their own, thus I always respect the nature of the materials I use. They have their own characteristics, and a story to tell – but only if we allow it to speak and flow through.”
Jane Lee (b. 1963), one of Singapore’s foremost contemporary artists, is celebrated for her fearless reexamination of what painting can be.¹ Her materially inventive practice dissolves the distinction between painting and sculpture, elevating surface, texture, and substance into acts of inquiry.² Trained first in fashion design before pursuing Replica Handbags s in the United Kingdom, Lee brings to her work a tactile sensibility attuned to structure and form—a legacy of her background in fabric construction.³ Her breakthrough installation Raw Canvas (Singapore Biennale, 2008) asserted a novel Southeast Asian voice in global contemporary art, propelling her as a leading figure whose work transcends aesthetic and cultural categorization.⁴
Emerging from a region negotiating its own hybrid artistic identity, Lee’s works resist tidy categorization. They mirror contemporary art’s increasingly globalized condition, where aesthetic boundaries blur and the act of painting itself becomes a question: what is painting in a world of expanded mediums and cultural entanglement?⁴ This enduring inquiry culminates in her 2022 exhibition Where is Painting? at the Sundaram Tagore Gallery, Singapore, where Painting Is - 3 Phases was presented alongside major new works.⁵
Rendered primarily in white and blue, Painting Is - 3 Phases exemplifies Lee’s spatial and conceptual mastery. The title evokes transition and progression—phases of thinking, making, and perceiving. While the palette appears restrained, closer viewing reveals minute flashes of pink, red, and green beneath the layered impasto surface. These subtle chromatic ruptures suggest an internal energy straining against compositional control, as if the painting’s living core were pressing outward to be seen.⁶
The triptych unfolds as a dialogue among its three panels. The uppermost work—presented on a wooden support—approximates the most “painterly” of the trio, maintaining a traditional rectangular form. By contrast, the two lower pieces, executed in acrylic and mixed media on hardened, sculpted canvas, both recall and subvert Lee’s earlier series in which surfaces appeared to collapse or peel away from their frames.⁷ In Painting Is - 3 Phases, this tension is pushed to its conceptual edge: the canvases seem to hover mid-fall, their curved surfaces porcelain‑delicate yet materially resilient. The tension between perceived fragility and actual solidity becomes the core drama of the work, destabilizing the viewer’s assumptions about gravity, texture, and form.⁸
¹ Russell Storer, “Jane Lee and the Materiality of Painting,” National Gallery Singapore Essays in Contemporary Art, Singapore, 2018, p. 14.
² Ibid., p. 16.
³ Singapore Biennale 2008, Exhibition Catalogue, Singapore Art Museum, 2008, p. 92.
⁴ June Yap, Negotiating the Global Contemporary: Art in Southeast Asia After 1990, London, 2019, p. 74.
⁵ Where is Painting?, Exhibition Catalogue, Sundaram Tagore Gallery, Singapore, 2022, n.p.
⁶ Russell Storer, op. cit., p. 18.
⁷ Jane Lee: Beyond the Surface, ShanghART Singapore, 2016, n.p.
⁸ Ibid.
⁹ June Yap, op. cit., p. 77.
¹⁰ Where is Painting?, op. cit.
¹¹ Replica Shoes ’s, Hong Kong, Modern and Contemporary Southeast Asian Art, sale catalogue, October 2023, lot 112.