Renowned for their highly tactile and textural surfaces, Jane Lee’s work investigates painting and its materiality. In her rich compositions, unconventional materials are applied to the surface in a laborious and meticulous process. Here, painting is seen as not the practice of representation, but rather the practice itself is represented. As she urges the process to be explored, she pushes the boundaries of this medium into the realm of sculpture and redefines conventional boundaries between two-dimensional painting and other media. For this show at ESLITE, Jane Lee presents a new body of work that explores this sculptural quality even further, including a “painting” which verges on three-dimensional installation art.

Donna Ong’s installations explore the interstices of media, bringing together spheres of imagination, fantasy and history. In her poetic installations, reality is presented as something highly provisional, and often assemblages of real, common objects merge with manufactured environments and dramatic lighting to create fictitious worlds. It is in this uncertain zone between reality and illusion that her worlds become spaces on to which one can project personal desire or lost memories and can explore the secret lives of objects.

Wilson Shieh is a painter trained in Chinese fine-brush (gongbi) technique whose work ranges from Chinese ink drawing on silk to acrylic on canvas to paper cutout collage. As a medium of narration, Shieh often chooses the human body as his subject, which he then translates into stereotyped figures or characters. It is through the employment of these highly symbolical figures that Shieh is able to question the nature of identity building in modern society. With this new body of works, Shieh reflects on his own personal identity and converses with his own past. Like chapters in a personal journal, the sixteen drawings of “The Cultural Life of Wilson Shieh” effectively explore the influences and roles that specific individuals or artworks had in shaping his own identity. Defined by an introspective quality, this series is not only a self-analysis of the artist’s psyche, but a broad exploration of the manipulative power of culture.