unsettled: summer mei ling lee
April 1-30, 2021
Unsettled is a solo exhibition of new work by Summer Mei Ling Lee that will run from April 1 - 30, 2021. This is part of re.flect, a program series that spotlights one of the gallery's artists each month. Each show will offer in-depth access to the respective processes and practices of our global artistic community. In addition, each artist has partnered with re.riddle to release limited edition, unique works at special prices. These exclusive pieces will only be available during the month of their related exhibition.
Curatorial Statement
Multi-media artist Summer Mei Ling Lee contemplates moments of unsettledness vis-à-vis the idea of the “adjacent possible.”* This theory proposes that every individual interaction within an ecosystem has the potential to exponentially increase the diversity of possibilities that follow. Attributes of this matrix of activity may range from notions of chance and expansion, to creation and variation. To this end, the state of being unsettled creates openness to the unexpected.
Through painting, sculpture, short narrative and a series of performances pulled from her Chinese ancestral tradition of bone oracles and bird symbolism, Lee examines this idea of the unsettled moment. The artist documents her experiences of rescuing birds in eloquent short narratives without giving into the temptation of providing any definitive conclusions. The lack of closure situates the reader in a space of uncertainty whilst concurrently positioning them as “writer” thus, imbuing them with agency to navigate through various outcomes. Furthermore, the artwork entails an aspect of simultaneity where variables may coexist without the conventional pressure to land into a single or conclusive narrative.
Resisting reconciliation, Lee asks if acting inside the space of uncertainty is the necessary condition for a meaningful aesthetic moment. In this vein, what is adjacent possible helps us embrace this historical moment as unknown but liberating.
* Adjacent possible is a theory coined by theoretical biologist Stuart Kauffman (1995) to explain how biological systems are able to evolve into more complex systems by making incremental changes in their makeup via interaction with other elements.
Programming
Presented alongside the exhibition will be programming about Summer Mei Ling Lee's creative process and practice.
To See is to Be at a Distance by Summer Mei Ling Lee x Marina Pugliese.
Thursday, April 8th at 11:30am PST/ 1:30pm CST/ 2:30pm EST/ 7:30pm CEST (Milan, Italy).
Marina Pugliese, art historian, museum specialist and Head of Public Art for the city of Milan, interviews contemporary artist Summer Mei Ling Lee via the Taoist fortune telling practice of Kau Chim (oracle messages) in search of answers during this time of uncertainty.
If you missed the event, you may view a recorded video of the event HERE.
Live Impromptu Interventions by Summer Mei Ling Lee.
Stay tuned for announcements about these impromptu interventions during the month of April.
Artworks
click on images for more detail
“George Steiner has a beautiful passage in The Grammars of Creation where he talks about Fra Angelico’s Annunciation in the Prado museum. He says there has been an incursion on the house of cautionary being, and one can sense in that painting the resultant shift of light.
Art is for me the space where we can experience this incursion, a moment of otherwiseness — not in the lethally deep waters of the turbulent ocean of life — but in the mimetic and therefore safe wading pool of a gallery or a museum.” - Lee, 2021
re.release
click on image for details
“My mentor once spent an entire class to describe a single, pre-classical Chinese pictogram, which coincidentally sounded like my last name. The pictogram featured a dash as a symbol of a bird in a grid which was the symbol of a cage, and a dash on the edge of the cage, one imagines as if about to take flight. Together the pictogram is translated as the human condition, with a slight edge towards a woe, or pity, but in my mind, acceptance. The transmutation of caged to flight and back again is to me a fitting metaphor for art-making, the aesthetic moment, and even if I remind myself that there are birds in these words in the spaces between our meetings, the characterization of every moment.” - Lee, 2021.
