LEE Kian Seng  李健省

Excerpted from the Sunday Star/ Malaysia/2000/12/03  

On the edge of innovation  

A strange-looking steel contraption sits among the many exhibits (note 1) at the National Art Gallery (Malaysia). At first glance, it may pass off as one of the installation art pieces that are so much in vogue now.

But then, its inscription bears the year 1972, and therein lay the contraption's value as well as the significance of its creator - veteran full-time artist Lee Kian Seng.

In the year that Lee created the piece, entitled Mankind, the art world had yet to acknowledge installation art. Back then, Malaysian art had not yet gone through the revolution effected by Lee's peers, ( Mohamad) Redza Piyadasa and Anthony Lau.

Despite this, a few people in the higher echelons realized that Lee's works marked the shape of art to come and thus supported him.

One was Frank Sullivan, a former secretary of the NAG's (National Art Gallery) Board of Trustees ( Malaysia). Sullivan first became impressed when he saw The Beggar and the Bird, a large oil painting submitted by Lee for the Seventh National Art Exhibition held at the NAG in 1964.

" It was my first exhibition and I was 18 years old, having just completed high school. I remember Mr. Sullivan and Dr R.S. McCoy showing an interest and asking me to explain my painting to them. At that time, I couldn't speak English well, and I remember having trouble trying to explain that my painting was mistakenly titled. It was not a beggar, but actually a poor man on a trishaw," Lee recalls.

The NAG( National Art Gallery Malaysia) bought the painting for its permanent collection and later short listed it for the first exhibition of Malaysian art held in Australia in 1965.

"With the proceeds from a few sales, I bought a wooden house which I also used as a studio for the next three years. This was all new to me as I did not know about exhibitions where you could sell paintings for money. All the while, I had been painting just to express myself. As a boy, I went through a lot of hardship, but had to suppress my feelings so much that I enjoyed the freedom of expression that painting allowed me," says Lee.

From here, Lee unravels tales of his childhood. Born in 1948 in Kimmon, a small island off mainland China, Lee journeyed with his parents to Singapore in 1952. A year later, the family moved to Klang, where he began schooling at a nearby Chinese-medium school.

"I couldn't afford membership fees for the school's art club so I painted on my own. However, this did not stop me from entering art competitions where I won many awards," he remembers with pride.

Among Lee's boyhood paintings was the 1959 watercolor Klang River, which depicted fishing boats on Klang's riverbanks. Critics have praised his eye for detail and judgment of space, skills that were considered advanced for a boy of 11.

"I was a science stream student - good in mathematics and geometry," Lee says. He feels his sound knowledge of science enables him to effortlessly switch from two-dimensional paintings to towering metal sculptures.

"To me, an artist should be able to work with many types of media. Art is about discovering the unknown. I learn for life. Retrospectively, I learnt new subjects and developed new concept and media simultaneously at a pace of approximate every three years," Lee says.

Indeed, this was the same approach that produced From the Windows of Red, another pioneering installation piece that is a double-sided painting hanging from a ceiling.

"I wanted to explore the limits and dimensions of a canvas painting. At the time I created it, I didn't know what to categorise the piece as. I only knew that I wanted to create something new," he remembers.

Some would say that he has artisan hands, while others, like Sullivan, put it to "qualities essential for success in art - dedication and industriousness."

Gift and guts certainly saw Lee through in coming years. Despite not having attended formal art school, he participated in many national and international exhibitions and competitions, where he was honoured with awards and fellowships.

Examples of local wins are the 1975 Major Award at the NAG's second Young Contemporaries Competition, and the commission for the Vision 2020 sculpture at Taman Wawasan at the Public Bank Berhad building in Kuala Lumpur (Malaysia). Recognition from the international arts community came from honours such as the 1993 Tokyo Creation Award Overseas Prize.

"The best thing about overseas exposure was that it allowed me to pit my works against the best of the world's contemporary art. I began to better understand the developments that were going on in our country, and I tried to reflect this in my works.

"For instance, I do a lot of batik and dye works which have more than one layer of images in them. This reflects our Malaysian society which multi-layered," rationalises Lee of his sought-after contemporary batik and dyes pieces, an example of which is Soul and Form 8 from his Yin Yang Series.

Apart from aesthetic qualities, his works are in demand because they are a visual record of Malaysian art history and a valuable example of intertextuality of varied art genres.

"At one stage, I liked Usman Awang's poetry and was inspired by his literary source, Anak Alam. He inspired me to travel to the east coast where I painted older works such as Anak Laut."

Lee's forward-looking approach also began to draw attention from local academia, who offered him part-time tutorships at visual art academies like Shah Alam's Institut Teknologi Mara (now UiTM). His students included prominent "third generation" artists. The newer generation of artists would recognise Lee's name (albeit spelt as LIM Kian Seng) from Malaysian art history textbooks.

Curators like Syed Ahmad Jamal acknowledged him by placing Mankind, his steel contraption, at the entrance of the former NAG premises (at the old Majestic Hotel, Malaysia).

It would seem that things have come full circle, for it is now Lee who has the clout to lend credible support for younger artists with new vision and directions. Short of heralding yet another art movement, this effort will only expand the legacy of Lee Kian Seng.

Note 1: 'Rupa Malaysia'- A Survey of Malaysian Modern Art Exhibition from  September 2000 to  September 2001 in conjunction with the official opening of the new National Art Gallery Malaysia.

  by Veronica Shunmugam  Sunday Star, Malaysia  December 3, 2000