乐安(Happiness and Peace) is an auspicious phrase, popularly displayed on the facade of old Straits Chinese houses and buildings, usually above the door as a harbinger of happiness and peace. In it, Malaysian painter Lee Sin Bee has placed his aspiration for a better appreciation of times gone by, of a Peranakan culture that was at once eye-poppingly baroque in its detailing, yet pregnant with propitious and didactic symbolism. Awash with sepia-toned nostalgia, each painting of the artist’s latest series provides a fragmented glimpse of a disappearing material culture, manifested literally in his technique with drips, obscuring splashes, erasures and encroaching negative space. By positioning his series as fading photographic stills, Sin Bee signals his urgent and impassioned alarm for his subjects’ replacement with skyscrapers and rapid transit systems in a hollow modernity.

About the artist: 

Born in a small town near Ipoh, Perak, Malaysia (1967), Lee Sin Bee obtained a scholarship (1985) from the Malaysia Institute of Art and graduated in 1989. Focusing extensively on Malaysian culture and life, Sin Bee is most popular for his Peranakan series which he uses as a window to a nostalgic past in glorious and painstaking detail. Winning first prizes at a number of local cartoon and watercolour competitions, the artist has also obtained Honourable Mention at the Philip Morris Art Awards (2001), Consolation Prize at the China-ASEAN Youth Artwork Creativity Contest (2007) and Honourable Mention at the 3rd Chinese International Figure Painting Competition, New York, USA (2011). Sin Bee has exhibited in Kuala Lumpur, Penang, Guangzhou and Beijing, where he was invited as one of the few international artists to participate in the 4th Beijing International Art Biennial. 乐安 Happiness and Peace is his fourth solo exhibition and first in Singapore. 

-Sundaram Tagore Gallery Singapore 

Image: © Lee Sin Bee 
Courtesy of the artist and Sundaram Tagore Gallery Singapore