Bing Lee

Selected Biography

Chinese-born New York-based artist. Lee started this pictorial journal in 1983, which relays his memories, fantasy and social concerns.

Selected Exhibition

He had several solo exhibitions including "Word by Word” showing a painted mural and new series of works on paper, based off the iconographic images of his on-going “Pictodiary” project. from April 24th to May 21st 2008 in 2X13gallery, Seoul

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Crossing into interactive work is not new to Lee. Coming to New York in 1979 after founding the Hong Kong Visual Arts Society, he co-founded Epoxy Art Group and would later become one of three co-founders of the Godzilla: Asian American Arts Network, a collective in the ’90s that would grow to over 200 members and forward Asian American art visibility in the U.S. Befriending other Lower Eastside denizens, during the ’80s, he was active working with Allen Dougherty (a.k.a. Red Spot) as part of the Red Spot Outdoor Theater. He also created post-ups in the tradition of graffiti/street-influenced artists of the time, cutting images out of his dairy, painting them and posting them on city walls.

"So, this kind of temporary mural I say is three things in one. One it’s site specific, two, it’s open studio, basically, I bring my whole studio there. And number three, it is a performance, interactive, because of people watching me doing it," explained Lee.

On one level, this third dimension is very direct in the form of interaction between audience, artist and artwork. Yet more subtlely, the day-to-day performative quality of the process and thearchival residue of the art object created — the documented record of the diary pages themselves —denies the ability to be categorized or understood in the encapsulation of a single moment. Instead it takes on the minutely digested fabric of being come into play, alternating as time passes, shifting as memory reinforces or fades away from the image. When viewed once, viewed again and re-digested as interactive mural or fused together in series, the glyphs take on different facets, different meanings — rendering again a deconstructionalist whole that is removed beyond the sum of its parts. In the case of his temporary site-specific work, which later only exists in the documentation of the documentation that was drawn from the recorded imagery of his diary, his work is continually recombined and reshaped by spatial and temporal regrouping.

Alexandra Chang_Art Critic