James Swinson/Third Text - lee wen 李文

Third Text/ no.45 Winter 1998-99 - pg.95-97
by  James Swinson

Singaporean artist Lee Wen started out as a painter. In 1989 he joined Tang Du Wu's Artist Village where he was increasingly drawn to performance and installation where art "becomes a process rather than a final product".' His first performances were in group shows with other members of Artist Village including Tang Du Wu and Vincent Leow. Since then, Lee Wen has created performances at events and art centers around the world.

Wen's work engages with questions of cultural and national identity. In the early '90s while living in London, he created a performance persona based on an image that originated in his paintings, which he dubbed 'Yellow Man'. To assume this guise Wen painted himself from head to foot in bright yellow paint parodying by excess the Orientalist's symbol of ethnicity. At the same time in the context of the performance, Wen sought to break free from a narrow symbolic value: I wanted to elevate the symbolism of yellow to that of the color of the sun or that of gold."' Wen's play on symbols does not get bogged down in simple binaries or fixed meanings but rather seeks to set up an unlimited chain of associations for his audience.

Wen refers to his Yellow Man performances as journeys. In these performances Wen adapts to the circumstances of the environment that they are presented in, taking up objects and images from the local culture, exploring the hybrid potential in combining his own iconography with that of his hosts. In India he walked across the sky at sunset by balancing on a rope between two coconut trees. In Thailand he used jasmine flowers and hair collected from barber's shops. Tradition and modernity are juxtaposed, ritualistic aspects of the Eastern tradition are used and transformed by Wen: "I need to create my own rituals to express what's going on in my life and in our society. So I manifest this in these performances."'

His work sets out to cross boundaries, bringing Eastern philosophy and traditions up against the, processes and ideas of Western avant-garde creative practice. In Journey of a Yellow Man No.4, which he performed in Thailand in 1993, he juxtaposed psychoanalysis and Buddhism:

On the wall, in front of the pile of hair surrounded by jasmine flowers, I had 12 plastic packets of hair arranged in the digital positions of a clock, suggesting time. The 12 packets had a Thai word each labeling them. The words are basic terms in Buddhist and Freudian psychology -1) EGO 2) NARCISSISM 3) KARMA 4) LUST 5) INSTINCT 6) BELIEF 7) BIRTH 8) DEATH 9) METTA 10) BHAVA-TANHA 11) VIBAHAVA-TANHA 12) NIRVANA. ~

In 1998, Wen returned to London, with a two month residency at Gasworks culminating in a performance, Connection/Location, at the October Gallery in June. In this piece Wen takes an unashamedly didactic approach to the audience, directly engaging with issues of artistic and political censorship in contemporary Singapore. Wen also uses the improvisational flexibility of performance to tailor his address to the local context of the UK whose colonial legacy is still evident in Singapore.
The performance commenced with a short video projection on to one wall, Wen positioned with his back to the projector included himself in the image as a shadow. The video is a fragment of another performance by Josef Ng, which took place in Singapore in 1994. The opening frames of the video give a fleeting glimpse of a newspaper headline, "12 men nabbed in Anti-Gay operation at Tanjong Rhu" highlighting the lack of sexual freedom in the city-state. The ensuing video is footage in which a man dressed in a long black gown wields a cane as he moves around a rectangular area marked on the ground. There is an atmosphere of the stylized violence and choreography associated with marshal arts as the man beats the ground with the cane and attempts to smash a row of white blocks. He has stripped down to a pair of briefs and, turning his back to the audience, he puts his hands into his briefs. He carries a handful of indiscernible black material, which he places like an offering amongst the shattered remains of his earlier activity; he kneels and relaxes with a cigarette.

The lights go up and Wen explains that Josef Ng was fined a $1000 for cutting off his pubic hair in public, the authorities evoking a law first imposed under British rule that defines this act as obscene. Since this performance which Wen helped organize, he and fellow Singaporean artists have been forced to perform outside of Singapore.

With the lights up we can see a series of props arranged around the space. Wen kneels in front of an aluminium bowl and masks his ears with a pair of large animal ears. He holds up a card printed with the paradoxical legend "I am not a performance artist". He starts to read extracts from a textbook on the Principles of Teaching in Secondary Education. Periodically he takes a bow burying his face in white flour that he has emptied into the bowl, turning his face into a grotesque white mask. Wen's opening ritual in the context of Asia echoes Frantz Fanon's analysis of the crisis of a black identity under colonial rule, where education is a regulatory weapon that erases the colonial subject's own history and culture instilling the values of the colonial masters.'

As quickly as these meanings are established Wen moves on, removing the ears and, whisking up a lace shawl from the floor, he metamorphosises into a bride, his mask becoming cosmetic veiled by lace. The lace had been covering a row of paper bags made from pages of newsprint. He takes a long rolled up paper and a chair from the far end of the space and unfurling the paper he tapes it to the wall revealing the ominous black and white photographic image of the billowing mushroom from a nuclear explosion. The Asian/Pacific region has historically been on the receiving end of nuclear explosions, from Hiroshima and Nagasaki to tests in China and the Pacific Islands. The old nightmare symbol of the destructive capabilities of the cold war superpowers had recently juddered back into the news in the context of India and Pakistan, postcolonial states boasting the ultimate destructive technology exported from the West.

   Wen emerges from underneath the veil and tells us that when the Queen visited Singapore, which had been a British colony for 100 years, she brought with her own water. Ironically, the current authorities exercise draconian powers to keep Singapore clean, including the extreme measure of banning chewing gum. Wen takes packets of chewing gum from a paper bag and proceeds to shovel strips into his mouth. This absurd prohibition, like all other such taboos, has turned chewing gum into an irresistible indulgence for Singaporeans travelling abroad.

Wen writes on his arms in felt-tipped pen. He takes off his shirt and presents two questions to the audience, "What is art good for?" and "Is art necessary?" He turns around and taking a huge wad of gum from his mouth sticks it to the nuclear mushroom, he takes a can of paint from the paper bags and sprays the gum gold and standing with his back to the poster the gum is transformed into a halo as he raises his arms in a gesture of crucifixion offering us again the questions of art. A complex flow of possible meanings emerge from this simple momentary, gesture -Judeo-Christian ethics, the scientific/ military complex, resistance, subversion martyrdom, and Art History...

Wen moves again and taking up the remaining paper bags one by one he paints ochre-colored stripes on the floor in front of the transformed image. The sweet and pungent smell of spices reaches our nostrils orienting us back to the East. Momentarily, Wen kneels before the image he has created as if before a shrine and proceeds to roll in the spices coating his body in a masala. He clears the floor to make a run up and then repeatedly launches himself across the room bouncing off the image of destruction and landing in the spices on the floor. An act of defiance rather than defeat. Spice is a material that Wen has often used in performance, as always it is a multiple symbol: "Variety of tastes from Asia also indicates the exotic view of Asia by others, also the domination from Europe in the past".'

Wen, marginalised by the oppressive measures of an authoritarian state, is forced to create his art outside of his own country. In doing so Wen has developed a complex and subversive approach to performance operating on the borderlines of identity: ethnic, national, spiritual, sexual and gender, calling into question not only the fragmentation of his own identity but establishing the instability of identity everywhere in contemporary existences! The alchemy of Wen's work transforms symbols into chains of meaning flowing across Western and Eastern discourses. His primary material is his body which metamorphosises in the course of his performance, not through acting or charicature, but through a flow of becomings.

Wen's performance highlighted the lack of critical content in so much of what passes for avant-garde practice in contemporary Britain. Coming from outside of the West, his work reminds us that performance can be used to create a sensuous and complex experience, which at the same time engages with issues of power and oppression.