Lee Wen and the Untaming of Yves Klein: Art and the Iterative Force

In defining itself against traditional theatrical characteristics, performance art has gravitated towards the ephemeral as one of its theoretical lynchpins. The photographic document of the performance preserves only fragments of the event yet secures the event's posterity. With Marina Abramovic's Seven Easy Pieces, performed at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York (November 9–15, 2005), Abramovic boldly put forth the rare alternative proposition of re-enacting past performance works from the 1960s and 1970s—one of her own and five seminal ones from her peers.¹ It was a daring interpretative intervention, one which undertakes a role to make anew (and thus undercut their preciousness) what has already been enlisted within a performance canon.

But cast within art historical and practical genealogies, such a feat may not look so out of place. Even with the contemporary valorization of the "copy" and postmodern refusal of the originary genius, one acknowledges that the backward and mimetic glance has long been part of artistic practice in both East and West. As the historian of renaissance art Svetlana Alpers succinctly puts it, "Art is made out of art." In copying an earlier work, a complex attitude can be evinced; it is at once an emulation that acknowledges an artistic debt and puts the later artist within an assured lineage, and also the staking out of an intellectual rivalry, a striving to best the precursor.² In many cases, it is part genuine admiration and part self-serving ambition. Such an imitation is not a dispassionate affair but struck through with an adamant wish to re-create or re-imagine the experience of the original work as it courses through the contemporary. Appropriately, Alpers quotes from T.S. Eliot's essay "Tradition and the Individual Talent," "The poet is not likely to know what is to be done unless he lives in what is not merely the present, but the present moment of the past, unless he is conscious not of what is dead, but what is already living."³ Working out of tradition, to take on the enduring legacy of predecessors, is to make new meaning out of what has historically been received and rested. We would conceivably be thinking that such a working method only behooves us to make art in accordance with the approved principles and spirit of the past work, but to boldly inhabit an entire form down to its distinctive details should cause us to think beyond the mere act of sycophancy. True, such blandishments do not serve to dislodge the certain position of the forerunner but they help us ask another question: Why is a particular artwork of such significance to the latter-day artist that he/she might want to emulate it?

In the case of the Singaporean performance artist Lee Wen, his interventions within the performance corpus are not fomented out of envy and artistic supersession but are rather ways to more legibly sketch out the contours of performance history to his local audience, who may not be acquainted about the constituents of performance art. In short, this is Lee's pedagogical service to his immediate community. He has modestly and informally called his series of re-enactments "revisits," suggesting a more partial and personal venture into his own memorial track. At the same time, he has termed his first two forays more stringently as "redux" and "revision," where the stress lies more within a purposive drive to revivify and restore through a changed performance modality. Lee's homage to John Lennon, Yoko Ono, Yves Klein, Nam June Paik, and La Monte Young is not wrought from a distanced respect but a willingness to engage with material that he believes will speak to the current phase of life in Singapore.

Lee's archival jaunt began with Lennon and Ono's 1969 Bed-in, an anti-Vietnam War protest where the couple stayed in bed for a week in their hotels in Amsterdam and Montreal, and sang their anthem "Give Peace a Chance" to the world's media. In Lee's Give Peace a Chance...