SINGAPORE | SINGADIARIES | ART

The yellow man who walked in chains

(a brief note on the Singaporean performance artist Lee Wen)

a somewhat transformed page from Yellow Man: Lee Wen, the Artist who Dared, by Chan Li Shan and Weng Pixin, from the series “Prominent Singaporeans,” Epigram Books, 2021

Who remembers Lee Wen? — From the responses I get in my Singaporean circles, not altogether too many of us.

Which is painfully confrontational for me — since Lee Wen is roughly my contemporary. And yet I smile. The idea of me realizing how soon the younger generation forgets about the deceased, even if one has been a human being of no minor achievement, I consider as one of Lee Wen’s signature, slightly-mischievous, posthumous works of art.

Lǐ Wén (李文, 1957–2019) was once a bank clerk but chose to write poetry and do art instead. If at all, he is best remembered for his work that combines performance, painting, and installation. In many ways, he can be seen as a popularizer of the idea of participatory art — where the audience, and the way in which it responds, are effectively co-creators of the work itself. As such, the art of Lee Wen is driven by social investigations that use art to interrogate traditional, stereotypical, and often biased perceptions of culture and society. Although Lee Wen struggled for an income for the best part of his life, he is considered to be one of the pioneers of the contemporary art scene in Singapore, and his work has been…