"aNew Paintings" is Lee Yi-Shuan‘s first solo exhibit in his young artistic career. The collection of work focuses on the artist’s time spend in his motherland, Taiwan, where the artist was born and has now resided in since 2020.
The word anew, carries weight in change, but further in much positive ways. In which Yi-Shuan unequivocally sees his current body of work. The significance of change in Lee’s work could be understood by simply his switch in mediums to oil paints, which is quite a transition from his previous acrylic paintings. The use of wet on wet paint application allows chance to happen in his pictures. During this transition, the artist’s focus has shifted from painting sceneries, which used to feature symbols, figurations, and additional narratives, to now a strong emphasis on the subjects and its overall forms, more so the possibilities of the forms becoming the subject and vice versa.
A trademark of Yi-Shuan’s work has always been humour. As some may see such humour as dark, it is moreover in ways such discrete that it is not intended to be obvious, but rather a genuine interest in some of the most mundane parts of day to day living. This notion of humour could also be a result in the artist’s overuse of black in some cases, as well as the dark contoured outlines of most objects in his pictures; which gives a cartoon-like quality to Lee’s work, and thus historically presumed as humorous. There is efforts of mind-play when digesting Lee’s paintings, where as the artist claims to be no such thing as narratives in play when creating his most recent work, it is yet undeniably pictures which involves representational forms. The answer to Lee’s thread of thought could be somewhat understood in the way his paintings are titled. The artist often uses the most unobtrusive elements in the picture when titling his paintings, in hopes of the viewer to generate his/her own idea of what they are seeing rather than the artist suggesting what or how they should see it. This open-endedness to his own creations as well as surrender to control is Yi-Shuan’s wish to allow unexpected potentials to come to him in order for future growth. Rather than the role of preacher, the artist is open to take on the role of the listener.