LeeLee Chan has expanded her choice of mediums from painting to photography, sculpture and installation. The paper-and-glue collage approach that she used in painting has emerged as an overall mentality that she takes to the making of each piece. Each of these mediums joins as a collaborator in a more complex exploration of its possibilities. Sometimes, mediums become indistinguishable through the endless transformation and accumulation of materials: cut-outs from fashion magazines and movie stills, found objects, glitter, industrial and reflective materials, everyday consumer products and aqua resin. In the end, each of the mediums is subservient to the resulting whole.
The way Chan perceives space is strongly connected to her experience of having lived in two extremely diverse environments, Hong Kong and Utah. In particular, her inclinations are informed by the lives of everyday people in Hong Kong who expand upon their constrained surroundings in irrational and illusionistic ways. This combination of chaotic experiences and an urban estrangement from nature is rooted in her work.
Chan thinks of her sculptures as groups of geodes, in which the saturated colors, subtle shifts, structures, cuts, light, geometry, and the organic are all interchanging. She searches for she so-called gems in everyday life. She think of herself as an object and image “healer” who seeks to affect the viewer’s perception of what is beautiful and what is absurd, bringing into focus things that people overlook by transforming objects and images into living entities, each generating its own meaning.
Chan’s sculpture is self-contained and houses a “glistening center”. Within this inner gem space, atmosphere and illusory space are created, juxtaposing seductive paint surfaces and cheap materials, playing with the line between handmade and readymade, glamorous and everyday, disposable and irresistible. The place she concoct is neither futuristic nor fantasy because the culturally-charged images are composed of everyday objects from our own time. It is a time capsule, existing somewhere between the real and the imagined, condensing debris of human civilization, and acting as an interface between the purely visual experience of the external and the internal worlds.
The way Chan perceives space is strongly connected to her experience of having lived in two extremely diverse environments, Hong Kong and Utah. In particular, her inclinations are informed by the lives of everyday people in Hong Kong who expand upon their constrained surroundings in irrational and illusionistic ways. This combination of chaotic experiences and an urban estrangement from nature is rooted in her work.
Chan thinks of her sculptures as groups of geodes, in which the saturated colors, subtle shifts, structures, cuts, light, geometry, and the organic are all interchanging. She searches for she so-called gems in everyday life. She think of herself as an object and image “healer” who seeks to affect the viewer’s perception of what is beautiful and what is absurd, bringing into focus things that people overlook by transforming objects and images into living entities, each generating its own meaning.
Chan’s sculpture is self-contained and houses a “glistening center”. Within this inner gem space, atmosphere and illusory space are created, juxtaposing seductive paint surfaces and cheap materials, playing with the line between handmade and readymade, glamorous and everyday, disposable and irresistible. The place she concoct is neither futuristic nor fantasy because the culturally-charged images are composed of everyday objects from our own time. It is a time capsule, existing somewhere between the real and the imagined, condensing debris of human civilization, and acting as an interface between the purely visual experience of the external and the internal worlds.
