Excerpt from a Messenger Chat on 21 December 2015
…
fools like me fight it like Don Quixote
you have been always don Lee Wen (hi hi)
but i m happy fool
my last performances made People cry but i feel good
perfect !
i cried too and then laighed
i feel good
i still do drawings and sing the old faashioned way.. i love iit people say i m old school but i dont care
thats great ! no need to follow the international rules ! so stupid…
yes, i do what i enjoy [End Page 231]
Lee Wen interacts with Veronika Radulovic's 'Hearts with Words' as part of 'Sense Yellow', Bangkok, 1993. Photos courtesy of the Veronika Radulovic Archive.
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Lee Wen lashes out with twigs, 'Sense Yellow', Bangkok, 1993. Photos courtesy of the Veronika Radulovic Archive.
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Lee Wen and the Dogs, private trip to Kuala Lumpur, 1993. Photos courtesy of the Veronika Radulovic Archive.
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Lee Wen (1957–2019) is a Singaporean artist regarded as a pioneer in Southeast Asian performance art. Lee is best known for his Yellow Man series, inspired by his time studying in London when he was often mistaken for an artist from Greater China, and in which he would paint himself yellow as an exaggerated symbol of racial and ethnic complexity within Singapore. Lee was an important figure for The Artists Village in Singapore where he first showed his work in 1990. He had solo exhibitions at the Singapore Art Museum, Grey Projects (Singapore), Your Mother Gallery (Singapore), The Substation (Singapore), and 3331 Gallery (Tokyo). His works have been part of numerous group exhibitions including Sunshower at The National Art Center and Mori Art Museum (Tokyo, 2017), Secret Archipelago at Palais de Tokyo (Paris, 2015) and the Singapore Biennale (2013). The Lee Wen Archive of his life and works is currently available via Asia Art Archive.
Veronika Radulovic is a German artist, art lecturer and curator. In 1992, she came to Singapore as an Artist in Residence at The Artists Village in Sembawang. Together with Koh Nguang How, Chumpon Apisuk, Lee Wen and others, she worked on the Project Sense Yellow Bangkok in 1993. In 1994, she was appointed as the first international lecturer at the Hanoi University of Fine Arts, a position sponsored by DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service). Working in cooperation with various institutions in Germany, Singapore and Finland, she curated several major exhibitions about contemporary Vietnamese art in Germany. Her publications on Vietnamese art and her time in Vietnam include Sicherheitsabstand (Safety Distance) in 2006 and most recently, Don't call it art! Contemporary Art in Vietnam 1993–1999 (2021, Kerber-Verlag), co-edited with Annette Bhagwati.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
