Intersections Gallery in Singapore recently announced its participation in Art Stage Jakarta’s upcoming first edition this August. Building on its success in Singapore, Art Stage has expanded to Indonesia in the hope of positioning Jakarta as the new art hub in Southeast Asia.The gallery will present the emerging Singaporean artist June Lee Yu Juan in a solo exhibition, showcasing four series created by her. She predominantly works with ink, playing with traditional Eastern cultural influences to provide them with a new contemporary representation. The artist has been praised by leading French newspaper Le Monde in 2015, after being spotted during Art Paris Art Fair.With her background in traditional Chinese painting and calligraphy, June Lee Yu Juan focuses on reviving the stature of Chinese ink within her generation. She believes that today’s youth is witnessing a “desensitization” towards their ethnicity, culture, and roots. By reworking the medium, she attempts to transcribe the richness of Chinese culture into a contemporary visual language. This process allows her to experiment and develop innovative techniques, such as in her photogram series.The four series being presented by Intersections at Art Stage Jakarta include “Cut in Space,” in which Chinese characters are converted into metallic sculptures. These are then transformed into two-dimensional form and printed on paper as photograms. This series highlights the artist's objective to help her generation embrace their Chinese roots as she translates ink art into a contemporary language within sculptures, photograms, and media created from aluminum.The “Nightfall” series challenges the negative connotations given to darkness and the void. June Lee Yu Juan enjoys experimenting with the color black, nad in this series she offers a new perspective by combining ordinary materials comprising of cling wrap, aluminum foils, and salt crystals with ink. This results in distinct textures, reminiscent of new universes and constellations.“I Wish Upon Many Stars” encompasses a series of three sculptures built with nickel chrome on anodized aluminum. Lastly, in “Calligraphic Matter,” June Lee Yu Juan twists, folds, and deforms Chinese characters and texts into “volumetric masses” which are juxtaposed onto cubic shapes, assembling various cultures and influences and providing the viewer with a new visual and linguistic representation.Art Stage Jakarta will take place from August 5-7.
↧