Sandra Lee was born in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
From the moment she learnt to hold a pencil, she drew incessantly. Most of her
time at school was spent looking out classroom windows and dreaming of faraway
places, and filling the pages of her textbooks with drawings. She left her home
country at age 18, and never looked back. Lee’s works are filled with
exuberance and innocence and is partially inspired by her own quest for ‘home’.
In her own words, ‘’Home is where you will never be a stranger, and never be alone.
Having uprooted myself from my home country, I have spent the last 30 plus
years travelling and moving from place to place. Home is where I put my
rucksack down for a moment and connect with nature, people and culture, and
make memories that influence my art.”
Lee became a Singaporean in 2016. She currently
resides between England and Spain, with frequent visit back to what she
now considers her home country, Singapore. A natural storyteller, Lee’s art
strikes a poignant balance of surreal childhood images and a vocal commentary
of her ideas on current and past social realities, and life experiences.
Lee’s works makes use of iconic images from
popular fairytales, nursery rhymes and fables, twisted by Lee’s fertile mind
into vehicles for her own stories with her own protagonists, in layers that
reflect her views of social and cultural issues. Each painting tells just
enough of a story to pull the audiences in, but also leaves enough of a
semantic gap for the creation of new stories.
Lee’s work isn’t about making grand statements,
about challenging norms or rewriting aesthetic standards. Instead, each piece
speaks quietly, telling us about the place the mundane and the fantastic meet,
and giving us the opportunity to travel there for a little while.
Artist statement
“I believe in magic. My work explores the
relationship between things that might or might not be, astonishing mysteries
that are not solved for us. Somewhere in there, is the answer. The truth,
perhaps, lie in place close to us, yet far away - our imagination.
It is not absolutely necessary that everyone
perceives the same information or interprets my paintings in the same way. I
hope my paintings and drawings will resonate beyond their immediate visual
impact, and continue to reward the mind and eye long after the symbolic
narrative is absorbed; and provide a vehicle for reflection and meditation, and
for mediation between living and knowing.”
