Collection of KADIST
In Studies of Chinese New Villages II Gan Chin Lee’s realism appears in the format of a fieldwork notebook; capturing present-day surroundings while unpacking their historical memory. The watercolor images on each note paper document the artist’s visits to various Chinese ‘New Villages’ in Malaysia. The studies, some in color and others in grey-scale, from this series include architectural ruins, portraits of people and animals, and groups of people in protest. Some of the images derive from historical archives and pictures of New Villages, including Chin Lee’s family’s village, where the artist was raised until he turned 18.
Chinese New Villages were a segregated settlement system created out of political motives by the British colonial administration in 1950 to counteract the communist penetration into Chinese communities. The order of segregation however was not lifted until 1960, when the Malayan Emergency was over. Today, among the 600 Chinese New Villages only a few have been integrated into the urban trace of expanding cities, whereas the remaining majority of these villages have been marginalized and perceived as slums. The aesthetics and temporalities found across Chin Lee’s drawings create an atmosphere interwoven with a historical consciousness of what has vanished and what remains in these villages.
Gan Chin Lee is a Malaysian artist of Chinese descent known across Southeast Asia for his realist paintings that painstakingly register the ethnic and religious complexities of Malaysia. The compositions of his works often employ an amplified spatial perspective in which he depicts multiracial and multicultural urban scenes in shared social spaces, such as street food stalls and coffee shops that are densely populated by characters indifferent to each other. There is usually a sequential narrative in his work, as he plays with temporality through polyptych and panoramic viewpoints. Urban angst, restlessness, and working class hardship are captured and hyperbolized in his enigmatic and disorientating canvases. His family’s linage as Chinese immigrants, and migratory waves of South Asian Muslim diaspora have been recurring subjects inthe artist’s work. Chin Lee’s visual vocabulary highlights mundane subjects and characters from real life with an absurdist approach. His self-anthropological gaze to the kaleidoscopic social tissue of Malaysian society turns his image-making practice into a living archive, a witness to historical processes.
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