Michael Goedhuis presents a major exhibition of the new works of the Chinese ink painter Chun-yi Lee. Chun-yi Lee was born in Taiwan in 1965. His family relocated to Hong Kong in 1970, where Lee attended university, graduating from the Chinese University of Hong Kong in 1988. Lee subsequently took an MFA from Tunghai University in Taiwan, and more recently, he earned a Ph.D. in Art History from Arizona State University, writing his dissertation on Daoism and the Ming dynasty painter Shen Zhou.
The seeds of Chun-yi Lee’s innovative paintings lie in work pioneered by his teacher and mentor, Liu Guosong. In the late 1950s, Liu rebelled against Taiwan’s conservative political and cultural atmosphere. A founder of the Fifth Moon Group, Liu painted semi-abstract ink landscapes that explored possible modern iterations of traditional Chinese painting.
Portraits, landscapes, and flowers are among the subjects of Chun-yi Lee’s works. Traditional Chinese painting relies on three elements: brush, ink, paper. Chun-yi Lee uses two of them – ink and paper – but dispenses with the brush, which is replaced by a process and technique of Lee’s own devising. Inspired by engraved stone steles and ink rubbings from antiquity, Lee uses carved squares of cork, to build up the painted surface of his works. The forms of Lee’s work evoke the past, but the method is unique to him. His flower paintings combine a traditional genre with a modern idiom: photorealism. The grid, precision, and intensely realized image recall the portraits of Chuck Close and other contemporary photorealists.
Chun-yi Lee demonstrates that contemporary Chinese art can acknowledge the past as a visual and intellectual source for creativity. His exploration of new techniques and mediums, the juxtapositions of past and present, text and image, realism and abstraction herald a new direction for ink painting.