Lauren Tzung Hui Lee

纸: Paper Series

Questions of the self are explored by looking into myself as a means to decolonise, rethink, and understand my identity and the spaces surrounding my body. These questions range from my diaspora and the unanswerable. Bringing these questions into various mediums and techniques within Chinese Folk Art culture to perform my identity and build a relationship with those who have come before me, as these techniques were performed to create my background and who I am now. Through this performance and the questions asked through various mediums, I create a work that is a reflection of myself that may attempt to answer the unanswerable through the typographies I create through the process. Creating a universal language that can be read by all who read it, a language of feeling and expressing without words. Transitioning and absorbing the remnants that are created through the making of work and these energies are also adjusted by others who have imparted a memory and energy into the material from previous use. The message is within the medium and the medium is where I will find the answers and understanding of myself. Expressing without words and understanding by feelings. Using calligraphy as an entry process to free writing and expressing the ideas that I find difficult to communicate. Then beginning to sculpt these questions into clay and capturing the form of the energies that were imparted into the calligraphy process. The clay used came before me and is constantly reused and holds vitalities of past experiences and impacted by anyone who has embedded their energies into this clay that in turn affects the questions I bring to it. The clay is then casted into the plaster to prospect what meanings have transitioned and transformed. Through this process I begin to collect fibres (consisting of bed sheets, clothing, toiletries, and the every day) that have become embedded with my energies and blending them with Chinese Hemp and Kozo that holds the same origins as I, that becomes transformed into a paper material. The paper becomes blind embossed onto the plaster and questions are interacted and forced between ink and dust that is exerted through by the body and the forces around the work during its creation.