ART CITIES:Vancouver- Khan Lee
For Khan Lee, all conceptions have the potential to be used as a medium. By isolating its properties from its given function and suggesting a new expression, anything can form the basis of a conceptual process. Khan Lee’s careful observation of the shapes of various durational events culminates in a body of work that iterates his visual conception of the essence of time.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Vancouver Art Gallery Archive
Offsite is the Vancouver Art Gallery’s outdoor public art space, presenting an innovative program of temporary projects, it is a site for local and international contemporary artists to exhibit works related to the surrounding urban context. Khan Lee’s “Red, Green and Blue” is the 14th Installation in the Gallery’s Offsite series in the heart of Vancouver. This movement-based sculpture-installation uses filtered light to animate nature. Drawing on broad references of horizon lines and landscape, the artist allows passersby to visualize the wind. Khan Lee produces sculpture, video, installation and performance art, which frequently draws on everyday objects and situations. Stacks of ceramic plates, three-dimensional reliefs composed of pencils and melted eyeglasses, stuffed socks and mounds of acrylic caulking are some of the materials with which Lee playfully explores formal arrangements. His film and video works also address the specificity of the medium, in some cases exploiting the materiality and durational nature of the moving image. Building on a sense of theatricality, Khan Lee’s installation acts as an elaborate set composed of three-dimensional objects that cast larger-than-life shadows against an enormous backdrop. The work draws viewers into the intersections of artifice and nature with an abundant field of transparent cones fabricated from sheets of hand-folded plastic film. It is both painting and sculpture, using light filtered through red, green and blue lighting gels to project an immersive field of coloured, grass-like forms on the architecture of Offsite.
Info: Curator: Diana Freundl, Vancouver Art Gallery Offsite, 1128 West Georgia Street, Vancouver, Duration: /11/16-17/4/17, www.vanartgallery.bc.ca