CUARTETO LEÓN CARDONA

Another space of diaspora consciousness is occupied by the work of Chinese-Australian artist Lindy Lee. Lee has used repetition of images throughout her years of artistic practice, from her early works using photocopied Renaissance portraits in the 1980s, to her current work of 2007 and 2008, in which she uses Chinese Buddhist images and images of past generations of her family. Jon Cattapan writes in the catalogue to her exhibition in Sutton Gallery that Lee references the photograph, yet is not a photographer. Rather, she uses the

29 _Ibid.

photograph as “a kind of talismanic source material (that) has allowed a deceptively simple serendipitous continuity of language – hers is the kind of art where persistent image- making and image-finding bleed into the one harmonious continuum.”31 _{Many of Lee’s} 1990s works incorporate repeated images of photocopies of European Old Master portraits positioned in grid or linear formations, and in differing variations of visibility and colour tone. At this time, Lee’s work was informed by a consciousness of diaspora, using the copy as a metaphor for “unbelonging” or cultural displacement. Lee, who was born in Australia of Chinese heritage, has stated: “I had always felt a fraud – a copy, and a flawed one at that … I was counterfeit white and a counterfeit Chinese.”32

In another interview, she compares herself, a “bad copy” of Chinese heritage, with reproductive art, for reproductive art does not fit into an ideal.33 _{Photocopies enable an} image to be repeatedly reproduced. In An Ocean of Bright Clouds, An Ocean of Solemn Clouds, 1995 (Fig. E5), Lee uses twenty-five photocopies of a singular image in varying degrees of exposure so that the face in the work appears and disappears in tone and in form, but is decipherable through repetition. Yet the repetition of the same face does not enhance its particularity, but reduces it to anonymity, enhancing the power of presence/absence, not of individuality. Similarly, portraits such as Fortuity, 1991 (Fig. E6) seem vaguely familiar to the eye acquainted with European art, yet are unidentifiable.34

Melissa Chiu (2002) points out that by adopting the copy as a methodology, Lee was attempting to locate herself within the Western art-historical canon, at the same time disrupting that tradition by transforming the notion of the original into the anonymous and

31 _{Jon Cattapan, Lindy Lee, Paul Knight, Simon Terrill, Michelle Tran; Every Day I Make My Way, text accompanying the}

exhibition, Sutton Gallery, Melbourne, 1 March 2007–14 April 2007, viewed 21 August, 2008, <http://www.suttongallery.com.au/exhibitions/exhibitioninfo.php?id=22>.

32 _{Melissa Chiu, “Struggling in the Ocean of Yes and No” in Benjamin Genocchio and Melissa Chiu, Lindy Lee, Craftsman}

House, Sydney, 2001, p. 16.

33 _{Peter Kohn, “Lindy Lee and Robert Scott-Mitchell”, in Wide Format On-Line Publication, viewed 2 October, 2008,}

<http://www.wideformatonline.com/content/view/153/58/ >.

34 _{Edward Colless, “Lindy Lee”, Artcollector, Issue 26, October 2003, viewed 2 October, 2008,}

Figure E5

Lindy Lee

An Ocean of Bright Clouds, An Ocean of Solemn Clouds, 1995 Photocopy & acrylic on board, 205 x 143 cm.

Figure E6

Lindy Lee

Fortuity, 1991

Photocopy and acrylic on Stonehenge paper,

198 x 168 cm

Collection Sarah Cottier & Ashley Barber, Sydney.

reproducible. Lee’s use of repetition in the different versions of the original on each panel is not structured as a progression or narrative but as an entity. Here, repetition is used to suggest how identity differs according to time and context in “a state characterised by moments of flux and uncertainty.”35

Edward Colless (2003) suggests that seeing Lee’s 1990s portraits from the position of cultural tradition has implications for Australian culture as a version or “copy” of European culture. Colless views these portraits that simultaneously obscure and delineate the face as metaphors for displaced cultural memory:

These plaintive ghosts from an Old World hang forever at both a temporal and geographical distance from us. Looking at Lee’s appropriated portraits we lose and partially recover images from the past, but images of a cultural tradition that was never really our own. Perhaps we are condemned to see them this way – those original works of art – as remote and speechless icons, because we are their false descendants. Just as the artist considers herself a false descendant of European art, producing false copies of that art as her own.36 A copy, however, as Colless points out, can only be regarded “false” or “bad” when it is compared to the original. Lee’s art produces a new sense of original by deviating from what it has copied while nevertheless relating to it as the basis of its being.

While these works could be claimed to be self-portraits of sorts, relating to cultural memory and artistic ancestry, Lee has in recent years turned to more direct forms of personal history and family ancestry.37 _{Her 2003 installation Birth & Death (Fig. E7)} comprises one hundred concertina books of eighteen panels of family-album images of enlarged faces, journeying across the floor of the gallery space. The gallery becomes inhabited with Lee’s Chinese family, past and present, alive and deceased, in stillness and in movement. The installation is at once a collective portrait and a singular self-portrait, a family genealogy and a moment in time.

35 _{Chiu, p. 16.}

36 _{Colless, <http://www.artcollector.net.au/files/Artist%20profiles/Issue%2026/Issue26_Oct2003_lee.pdf- >.} 37 _Ibid.

Figure E7

Lindy Lee

Birth & Death, 2003

The works by Zhang Huan and Lindy Lee exemplify the fluidity between presence and absence, and the ambiguities inherent in individual, inherited and collective identity. Magdalene Keaney claims that artists who consciously deal with absence and death highlight the paradoxical notion that absence (and death) can be implied in a portrait by the presentation of the face (as we have seen in Lee, Huan and Boltanski’s work), but equally, a subject can be represented but not physically seen.38