HUM, the first solo exhibition of the work of Sinje Lee, the multi-faceted artist, who is also an actor and singer, will be on view at the Tina Keng Gallery from October 22 to November 13, 2011. The exhibition will showcase one of her earliest works, A-MAH (1998), along with more than ten recent paintings, installations, and video works. A catalogue will accompany the exhibition.
The work A-MAH is inspired by Lee‘s deceased grandmother. Lee‘s mother allowed each woman in the family to keep one of the grandmother's possessions. Lee did not choose jewelry or gold, but rather, a floral summer shirt that her grandmother often wore, and which she then incorporated into A-MAH, by sewing the shirt onto the canvas. This was the start of Lee’s use of painting as a healing process, in which she melds indescribable suffering and grief into a variety of colors. Through clumps and strokes of the brush, her works tell the story of murmurs and self-wandering. The works of the HUM series, for instance, offer an inner spiritual imagining. Whether waves of melancholy or vortex-like screams, to the whispers of the trees, flowers, grass, and mountains, the colors press against each other, combine, and speak of belonging.