This exhibition for Mind Set Art Center in Taipei focuses on the work of Filipino women artists of various generations in conversation with the work of the artist Ileana Lee done in the seventies and eighties in Manila and in Fukuoka. The said work involved the process of placing dotted lines, carefully culled from strips of tape uni- formly cut, onto the floor, wall, and ceiling of a white cube to delineate space within space. It is a conceptually sharp and at the same time sensitive claiming of space for the woman artist in the art world. The dotted lines seem to be at first marginal, faint indicia of peripheral presence. Ultimately, however, they transform into an all-over atmosphere, with the work of the woman pervading both interstice and structure.
The artists for the exhibition were asked to respond to this work and reflect in different registers on the unproductive rigidity of the inside/outside binary and fulfill the promise of Lee to finally comprise. In doing so, they may be able to settle in and create a realm or domain for themselves and for others across and within themselves.
The title of the exhibition is taken from an interview of Lee about another work titled Pond (2013) (1) composed of spinning bamboo poles. According to her: “Pond is an installation of kinetic sculptures with audience participation. The sculptures animate the gallery space when moved by the viewer…These pieces came about with a ques- tion in my mind at one time. Thinking about how one has to consider the element of stability to hold a three-dimensional work, we sometimes have to create a massive base or support to hold it down.
《池塘》Pond｜2013｜錄像、展覽紀錄｜Video, exhibition archive
So my question was, what if you reduce that base to a single point—will it still work as a sculpture? I was toying with a stick, string, and clay in my studio. I came up with the interesting result of spinning poles that are held by string on the top with the stick resting on a nail.
These two works of Lee speak of the creative agent in the act of being in space, precariously, and yet decisively. Lee (b. 1951) is a printmaker who was active in the Manila art world beginning in the 1970s. Writing about Lee’s exhibition at the Cultural Center ofthe Philippines (CCP) in 1980, then CCP director and artist-curator Raymundo Albano (2) described her work as exhibiting “high craftsmanship and restraint of visual statement” and providing “an illusion which, upon reaching deeper visibility, brings us to a philosophical questioning of what print- making is all about.” Lee is seen in this exhibition in Taipei as a cipher and as a curatorial method of gathering women artists under the aegis both of women’s art and the Philippine contemporary.
The works of these Filipino women artists form an inter-generational survey of artistic interests from the seventies through the present. It is around Ileana Lee that these forms coalesce, elaborating on the agency of the woman artist to think through and act on the difficulties of being present in the social world of art. There are tendencies to consider here.First there is the desire, as well as the trepidation, to test the boundaries, to encroach on hitherto forbidden territories.
The home, for instance, is robustly articulated, infused with affective memory,but also nuanced with violence from within and outside. Nature, too, is evoked quite wistfully to the degree that it is gleaned as ominous, at once source of life and basis of ruin. In all this, the atmosphere that is homely and natural is charged as a force. The artist is conscious about this force because it ordains both space and time of appearance, of both visibility and visuality.
Second is the decision to flesh out the aforementioned desire with commensurate materiality. In this regard, the women artists are at once astute and responsive to the requirements of the discipline and the critique of the discipline. They experiment and reinvent; they refunction and repossess. They deepen their vocations in image making through painting, printmaking, or photography. They question the documentary instinct and recover frailty in light of the capture of representation. They explore spaces like windows and floors. They pare down medium to particles. They dismantle the armature of painting, the telos of fairy tales, the architecture of the house.
Finally come the effort and the nerve to face social structures that have so decisively forged the norms of gender, sexuality, and subjectivity. As women artists, they nurture the conditions for these predicaments to be felt, to make them palpable. And in the same breath, they are generous in holding out a different universe of relations as they cast stones into still water and plot out more lines on the foundations of a very personal and very political life.
- "Ileana C. Lee: Pond, Artist Statement," Ektopia, 13 August 2013, http://www.ektopia.us/ektopia-artist.html.
- "Ileana Lee: Impressions, then Illusions," in Raymundo Albano: Texts (Quezon City: Philippine Contemporary Art Network and Vargas Museum, 2017),74.