Lindy Lee Negotiates Heart, Body and Mind

By Neha Kale

The failure to belong to a culture is often framed as a personal shortcoming. But for Lindy Lee, the perspective of an outsider can lead to acts of artistic generation and open the door to truths you don’t yet know.

The Australian-Chinese artist grew up in Brisbane, Queensland, during the 1950s and 60s, before the end of the White Australia policy, the regime that restricted immigration from non-European countries for nearly seven decades. Although she once yearned to fit in, she now believes that embracing her otherness is a source of rich creative power. “You know how it is in the schoolyard, when one has a face that is different,” says Lee, now in her sixties, a note of wistfulness in her voice. “But if you have to grow up on the fringe of something, or if you are straddling things, you are forced to understand worldviews in different ways. It might be painful, but it is your gift.”

No Up, No Down, I Am the Ten Thousand Things, 1995/2020, photocopy, synthetic polymer paint, ink on Stonehenge paper, dimensions variable. Photo: Anna Kucera. © the artist. Courtesy the artist; Sutton Gallery, Melbourne; and MCA Australia, Sydney

Moon in a Dew Drop, the largest survey of the artist’s 35-year career, is about to open at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney. It comes during a moment in which Australian institutions are grappling with the questions of representation and power that are driving the wider artworld. A survey exhibition from an Australian woman of colour is still an all-too-rare occasion. The show, which features over 70 artworks from the 1980s to the present, is a study in the depth and intricacy of the artist’s vision. Lee, who is widely considered one of Australia’s most important contemporary artists, has been exhibiting nationally and internationally for the past three decades, showing everywhere from Japan and Malaysia to Canada and New Zealand. She arrived on the scene during the early 1980s, an era that saw Australia start to publicly question its national identity, galvanised by the 1988 bicentenary, the 200-year anniversary of the arrival of British colonisers in Sydney...READ MORE

Cover Image: Birth and Death, 2003, inkjet print, ink, synthetic polymer paint on Chinese accordion book, dimensions variable. Photo: Anna Kucera. © the artist. Courtesy the artist and MCA Australia, Sydney