Lee Wen (1957–2019)
BIOGRAPHY
Lee Wen was born in 1957 to Lee Hock Min and Lee Mui Lan. As a child, Lee Wen’s world was constituted by his neighbourhood, “a big swamp” in which water hyacinths were grown to feed the pigs. His favourite book was The Lonely Sea and Sky (1964) by Sir Francis Chichester. Chichester had been a “hopelessly bad pupil” who went on to sail across the Atlantic from west to east. Lee Wen took him as a role model.
From as early as 1978, Lee Wen started writing his own songs. He carried around his brother’s guitar as he did not have his own. His friend from scouts in school, Ramazan, had given him a book with empty green paper and he’d filled it with his drawings. This led to the work A Waking Dream (1981). Meanwhile, Lee Wen worked hard as a banking officer, and later as an art student at LASALLE College of the Arts. He remembered sitting together with Zai Kuning, in the dim light of candles, shadows flickering over their faces as they read poetry aloud. There was no electricity in Zai’s bedroom.
Through Zai, Lee Wen joined The Artists Village. Established by Tang Da Wu in 1988, it was a hotbed for experimental art. Koh Nguang How recalled that Lee Wen had become “one of us”, when he did a reading of his poetry outdoors, past midnight, in the rain, holding a notebook in one hand and an umbrella in the other. During this time, Lee Wen also painted Yellow Man, Where are you going? (1990) The title of the painting was created in a moment of rage, when an art critic commented that the painting was a simple mimicking of the West.
Lee Wen attempted to answer the question, through a study of Chinese self-portraiture and an attempt to perform naked in a confrontation with himself and his vulnerabilities, when a fellow artist was unjustly evicted from his studio. It was “a conversation with the canvas” and a question to which the series of performances Journey of a Yellow Man (1992) was the answer. Over the course of his life in art, through several mediums and modes, we can discern Lee Wen’s poetic sensibility infusing his political and social consciousness.
Journey was partly an expression of Lee Wen’s feeling of being marginalised in England, where he pursued a diploma in art and design at the City of London Polytechnic from 1990 to 1992. While there he was “Othered”, dislocated and displaced. People saw him as Chinese, but having studied at an English-medium school, he could barely speak or write Chinese. There was a gap between his appearance as Chinese, and his inner world that was fuelled by ideas from Western philosophy and culture. The sociologist Erving Goffman in 1986 coined the conception of “passing” which describes a form of concealment and an effort to make oneself appear to be normal within a dominant culture. This was the opposite of what Lee Wen was doing with regards his ethnicity. Instead of hiding it, he flaunted it. Lee Wen was shouting at the world through his performance of Journey.
Lee Wen was subversive in that he sought to resist a dominant political framing and hegemonic thinking. Lee Wen’s work has been centrally concerned with political and social commentary. He had studied the events of 1987 of Operation Spectrum with some conscientiousness. He wrote:
They killed the chickens, to scare the monkeys. So back to zero. Then count again. Start again. Don’t go back to zero. Keep on counting. See where it leads you. It’s our destiny. Unless you want history to repeat itself. Don’t give up. You have a choice. Beware of fast cars and condominiums…It’s a promise. If we play the game, we will get the prize. The whole prize, from beginning to end. But there’s no such need for those who love. But there’s much to lose...and to fear. The loss of power. The loss of gold and silver. The darkness of morality. Don’t you want to live forever?
This writing was part of Lee Wen’s performance work entitled Ghost Stories (1997), performed in Cuba, and dedicated to the 500 or more political prisoners in Cuba. Lee Wen’s work was certainly a commentary on the politics of the day. A key feature of his writing and other work was the literary and poetic device of political sarcasm, where he created ironic and cheeky commentary on Singapore society. Consider his works such as the Chewing Gum Paintings (1999) that draw attention to global perceptions of Singapore and its obsession with being clean.
In 1999, Lee Wen married Satoko Sukenari and they had a son, Masatoshi Lee. That too, for Lee Wen, was a kind of art. Art happens “when we’re not looking”, he said.
In his performance Strange Fruit (2003), Lee Wen left his hair uncut in memory of his best friend Harnek Singh. He was a man still in grief, yet he forced himself to smile. Moral and poetic expression could not be easily untangled. For Harnek’s sake and motivated by friendship, Lee Wen persevered in his artmaking, eventually reaching a milestone with a retrospective at the Singapore Art Museum.
In 2012, Lee Wen established the Independent Archive and Resource Centre (IA) to record and archive performance art works for the art community in Singapore. Number 67 Aliwal Street was recognisable from its Balinese-style front garden.
Outside 67 Aliwal Street, I took a photograph of Lee Wen holding two sunflowers in one hand, wearing his shirt over his mother’s red silk dress, moving solemnly in a circle, in the late afternoon. “I’m taking my sunflowers for a walk,” he said. Lee Wen’s wearing his mother’s dress created a picture of androgenicity, blurring the lines between binaristic male and female.
Lee Wen’s project entitled Anyhow Blues (2010) incorporated his interest in music into his art. The lyrics of his songs constituted a significant portion of his poetic expression. In a song he wrote and composed called ‘Big Sky Mind’, the lyrics were as follows:
I am a red dress
frozen in
frozen in time
frozen in time
waiting for the sun to come
set me free again
His mother’s red dress was a recurring motif in Lee Wen’s work. With reference to the lyrics of the song, Lee Wen did a colour pencil drawing of his mother’s red silk dress encased in a block of melting ice. Through his use of the red dress, Lee Wen gestured at the fluidity of gender.
In 2017, at 60 years old, Lee Wen was finding great satisfaction in mentoring younger artists, such as Kai Lam, Loo Zihan, or the poet Jason Wee, who published a selection of Lee Wen’s writings in the book Boring Donkey Songs. Meanwhile, his awards could be seen balancing precariously on a cardboard box next to his bed. The awards were treated respectfully and yet not too seriously.
Lee Wen often referred to himself as “the other Lee”. Here, he is of course talking about Singapore’s first Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew. Lee Kuan Yew’s life has been likened to the life of Singapore, according to which his ability to overcome the odds depicted the Singapore Story of overcoming the odds. Literary scholar Philip Holden for instance has argued that there has been “an identification of the Singapore state apparatus with Lee himself.” I wish to ask, could the story of Lee Wen also be the story of Singapore? I think so, and not just in the sense that his is a story of overcoming the odds, of making it as a celebrated artist and a Cultural Medallion winner, having been raised by a single mother who worked as a janitor and subsequently a drinks stall auntie.
Lee Wen was a product of his society in being adaptable and resilient. In 1994, funding for performance art was cut, but Lee Wen continued to make art. Lee Wen was persistent. There may be many people all over the world who have sacrificed greatly to pursue life as an artist, but they may not have had to do so in the face of a ten-year ban on funding for performance art and government prohibition of unscripted performance. And while it may be easy for casual onlookers to feel that there is nothing unique about art that functions as social commentary, perhaps it means something more in a society where the government has determined that art must be apolitical and closely monitors anyone who might endanger the harmony of society.
He later said of his struggles, “It was as difficult to be a performance artist after the ban as much as it was before. It’s never easy doing performance art, no matter what the funding is like, with or without support. Both sides of the picture, it’s difficult. Good art is never easy. But I can say one thing, that it’s not as simple as it sounds as well.”
Lee Wen died on March 3, 2019, of a lung infection. Lee Wen had written, in an inscription of a book:
To live to learn
To fly to love
To remember
Friends.
It is with this spirit that this bio has been written.
Author Photo © iPRECIATION and the estate of Lee Wen. Author Biography © Chan Li Shan. All rights reserved.
