Lee Kit “Every Breath You Take”

李杰 “每一口气”
Minsheng Art Museum, Shanghai, 民生现代美术馆, November 2012 – January 2013

Lee Kit’s work deals with the intimacy established between us and the products we use, especially in relation to our body. The bathroom towels, hand creams, tooth brushes, shower gels…

His work gives a very fragile and mundane impression. The visitor has to overcome his usual attitude of using and ignoring the objects that Lee uses in installations. (The effect of the ready-made.) If this happens, the visitor is rewarded by entering a new dimension where it is possible to contemplate on this human-object relationship and how it influences our lives.

I found that an important aspect of Lee’s works in the way how they are installed. I have seen previous installations on a smaller scale, where the works have been presented in a ‘showroom setting’ that reminded of the model room installations at IKEA (for example at the Vitamin Art Space in Guangzhou or at Osage Kwun Tong in Hong Kong last year). I always felt that this worked very well, especially with the works Lee did on fabric (hand painted table cloths, etc.) The installation looked once again very mundane, but at a second sight, visitors could notice the small details pointing towards the interventions of the author.

In the Mingsheng Museum show in Shanghai, Lee’s works have been more or less freely scattered around the gallery space which was actually quite a large space. In my eyes, this made the works look a bit lost, especially given the fact that no special lighting was used. I understand that no museum lighting was used, because it would go against the ‘mundane-ity’ of Lee’s installations, but as a result, in the big gallery halls, his works seemed very small and it needed additional imaginative effort from the visitors if they really wanted to come to the core of Lee’s artistic thinking.

My feeling was that this show has been probably set up in quite a short time. The usually excellent exhibition architecture in Mingsheng Museum was absent, and I believe it could have been a better show. Still, it was good to see Lee’s works in Shanghai. I appreciate the modesty and tenderness in his work, an element which I think is very rare among Mainland Chinese artists. I believe it needs a certain confidence in oneself and firmness in one’s ideas to come up with works as Lee does. On the mainland the lack of these qualities is too often substituted by bright color, big size and spectacular execution.