Lindy Lee

Monica Blignaut
Feb 20, 2021
2 min read

Artist 297

Lindy Lee

Sculptural installations

Connecting to the Cosmos

Lindy Lee (born 1954) is an Australian painter and sculptor. Her work blends the cultures of Australia and her ancestral China and explores her Buddhist faith.

Lee’s practice explores her Chinese ancestry through Taoism and Ch’an (Zen) Buddhism – philosophies that see humanity and nature as inextricably linked.

Symbolic gestures and processes that call on the element of chance are often used to produce a galaxy of images that embody the intimate connections between human existence and the cosmos.

Lee’s works are intentionally slow to impart their secrets. Rather than singular visual statements, they are thoughtful objects where meaning emerges from sustained meditation.

Investigating and questioning multiplicity of self has remained a central concern in Lee’s practice.

Lee’s work, as a Chinese-Australian artist, has been crucial to visualising the experience of Chinese diaspora in a country that has historically whitewashed its multiculturalism.

Lee has also developed these splatter gestures into sculptural forms by throwing searing molten bronze on to the foundry floor, which embodied the Buddhist act of renewal where all that is held inside oneself is released.

Such mark-marking emphasises one’s presence in the moment, and can also be seen in Lee’s repetition of burning holes in photographs, on paper scrolls and through sheets of metal.

Each mark-marking gesture is a pitch into eternity – meeting with this moment – indeed in Buddhism eternity isn’t anywhere else but here, there is only this moment of now.

Her sculpture work like in ‘Moonlight Deities’ reflects a connection of circles, light and pattern almost providing a smaller scale of what the ‘cosmos’ could be. She explores our connection to the universe.

‘We consciously live in our bodies, but we are actually very much part of a greater body - the body of the world.” Lindy Lee