Lee Kit
HIS GAZE HAS TURNED INTO DISDAIN FOR THOSE WHO ARE WELL-INTENTIONED YET INCAPABLE. (A QUIET DAY) | Fridericianum, Kassel
25 January - 15 June 2025
Notes on Recent “Temperature Changes” in the Work of Lee Kit
Martin Germann
Probably aiming to grant everyone access to his art, Lee Kit continues to see himself a painter, although only a small excerpt of his work materializes in the traditional form of panel painting. In an interview around the exhibition We used to be more sensitive, which was held in 2018 in Tokyo’s now closed Hara Museum of Contemporary Art, Lee countered a question about painting’s ongoing relevance, responding that it would be “about the practice rather than form.” What are the basic painterly constituents for an artist who repeatedly considers Vermeer as the only historical role model — considering the Dutch master’s antiheroic emphasize on everyday life, his graceful play with the borders of light and shadow, and his interest in the domestic, all embedded in a subtle form of social messaging?
This starts with the frame, which in Lee’s understanding refers not so much to the conventional function to separate the pictorial space of the painterly object from its vicinity. For him, “framing” means, rather, the creation of distanced concentration on an emotionally charged state. For Lee this clarity emerges with opposite attributes such as opacity and open-endedness, so his idea of framing essentially integrates the totality of the (exhibition) space. If doing an exhibition, he asks the museum to prepare a few artificial walls for him, almost as if a canvas is being prestretched and a landscape is laid out in which he can work. After arriving at the institution, his projects continue to go their way naturally.
Basic elements in it could be carpets installed on the wall or projectors, used to show film clips as well as to serve as light sources, and other gestures of inversion or self-reflectiveness. Lyrical text appears in the projections, mostly self-authored monologues negotiating basic questions in human relations. Soundtracks (he’s an avid music lover) might hum in the background. Constellations of media emerge, such as It makes you small (2019), the only confirmed work in the Kassel exhibition at this moment (3.12.2024). It consists of an acrylic painting on cardboard on which is photography with a shy female character and the barely legible term “gloss” that has been scratched into the painting surface. This again is shown through a pastel-colored projection with text (as usual in the artist’s work in the typeface Book Antiqua, which mimics European calligraphy from the 15th and 16th centuries) and interchanging chromatic planes reminiscent of abstract painting. It could happen that the artist implements objects such as cups or containers from local DIY or furniture stores — physical placeholders for “still life.” Architectural conditions such as existing walls, windows, plugs, any obstacles, and daylight are pragmatically integrated in his strategy of nesting into the spatial logics of the institution, which results in what has been described as a “situation” or “setting.”
In a sparse and precise arrangement, each of these situations creates clarity through their meandering atmosphere of deceleration; their capacity to breathe as nebulous intermediate zones among moving image, painting, photography, and object; along with a physically tangible emptiness. Instead of becoming too effortful in describing these atmospheres, it should be said that they repeatedly trigger basic feelings such as anger, boredom, sadness, loss, fear, or joy. We could speak about emotions as “universals from below”— or from within — which in Lee’s decidedly anti-elitist work gain a form for everyone to tune in with. To quote Spinoza, emotions are treated such as — “lines, planes, or bodies.” 1 Over the many years that Lee’s practice hasn’t shown any remarkable spatial or technical growth, his installations never became larger or claimed more space. Instead, the way they develop and change is to react to the artist’s personal circumstances as well as the larger political frameworks they’re embedded in.
Lee’s work has been described as an archetype of an artistic practice from Hong Kong, a global economic hot spot in its mix of European colonial heritage and contemporary China, where public space has hardly existed. Brand names, logos, and advertising slogans from cosmetic and hygiene companies, whose flawless faces loom on every corner, have been a core element in his work until recently. These occasionally generic fragments have made “templates” for Lee: culturally standardized formulas for living a life, liminal borders between inside and outside, blanks to fill in by desires almost in the same way as one uses language. Hong Kong residents keep on being squeezed between the sheer weight of the economic power of high-rise buildings, glass, and concrete to enhance performance, to not waste time. In their opposite capacity to stretch and absorb time, Lee’s situations almost radiate an exuberant misuse of economic dogmas — time is losing its dimension of efficiency. They force a nonproductive attitude — which could also hint at another idea more socially attributed idea of production, one standing outside of competition.
Already his earliest known works, the hand-painted cloths — delicate and frameless paintings on cheap cotton fabrics, whose appearance is reminiscent of Agnes Martin or Daniel Buren, carry this character just simply through their explicit connection to the historical time and place they emerged from. While he first used them as curtains (to create a tiny bit of privacy), the artist later utilized them as picnic blankets during the SARS pandemic in 2003, when outdoor gatherings were forbidden. One year later the hand-painted cloths were used as silent banners in anti-government demonstrations. Over the next roughly twenty years there followed continual local political struggles, the emergence of an international art scene, along with prestigious institutions — and Lee representing Hong Kong at the Venice Biennale (2013), marking a key achievement in discrete subversion of the status quo. But in the wake of the extreme social uprisings around the highly authoritarian National Security Law that China installed around 2019 and 2020, a change of temperature in the artist’s work can be perceived. For a while, his work has even been suspended while he relocated from his home Hong Kong to Taiwan’s capital Taipei. He went through a process of “basically doubting everything around me, including politics, social activism (that I was never part of ), making art, or being part of the art scene, etc.” 2
The artist writes: “Basically, I am angrier and quieter than I used to be.” 3 In an exhibition in 2020 in Hong Kong, he asked someone to crush the refrigerators for him (since he had already left Hong Kong), a gesture he repeated later himself. While in earlier installations, cosmetic brands and tiny household objects acted as representatives of everyday life, these elements have disappeared. Nowadays, crushed and dented mass-produced sharp and heavy machinery fill the exhibition space, mirrored by spray-painted cloud formations on metal plates on the walls. We might all be squeezed-in between inside and outside, between clouds and machines. The poetry of Lee’s situation became more earnest, the spectrum between soft and hard, between proximity and distance has widened, each sentiment is more on the verge of collapsing into something catastrophic. It might be worth mentioning that Lee’s personal health had also changed. In 2021, he lost part of his eyesight through a stroke. In his ongoing goal to create clarity he experimented with reflective packing tape as layered, glazing projection screens, which lead to a new dimension of high-pitched artificiality in the sense of “shine” as a basic quality in his art.
Lee’s work has long been gaining its political dimension from not being outspokenly political itself. The artist even distanced himself from a direct use of his work as carriers of political messaging. The title he chose for his exhibition in Kassel is His gaze has turned into disdain for those who are well-intentioned yet incapable. (A quiet day). He wrote this sentence originally in Chinese, and it expresses his doubts toward what he experiences as crucial difference between politics, whose phraseology keeps on dominating the global art discourse, and realpolitik that can enable change. We end where we started, in concluding that this title is nothing more than a frame, at once light and heavy: “heavy yet light, light yet heavy, and kind of sad.” 4
1 Baruch Spinoza: “I shall treat the nature and power of the Affects, and the power of the Mind over them, by the same Method by which, in the preceding parts, I treated God and the Mind, and I shall consider human actions and appetites just as if it were a Question of lines, planes, and bodies.” Spinoza, Ethics, preface, chapter 3.
2 Lee Kit, email to the author, 22.10.2024.
3 Ibid.
4 Ibid.
