It’s a Saturday at noon, and the August air is brutal. I can’t breathe in without feeling the sheet of sweat on my skin. Everything is heavy in the heat of Hong Kong, but relief is only 21 stories away. Around the corner from where I stand, 35-year-old sculpture artist Leelee Chan approaches. She has short black hair and warm eyes. Thin wire frames rest atop the bridge of her nose and dainty gold chains lay softly around her neck. She leads me to her cove of treasures.
Chan’s studio resides in an industrial building in the Kwai Fong district of the New Territories. With one of a dozen 900-square-foot lots on her floor, she has created an artist’s haven of found objects. There are foams, shells, bubbles, and lampshades. Emptied egg cartons hold seafoam-tinted molds, and upright LED construction lights mirror the distant rainbow towers in view from the window. Remnants of excess materials and sketches lay beside art books and completed works in all corners of Chan’s space. Settling into the contours of the studio, she rehydrates with a can of Watson’s sparkling water and begins to share her story.
Originally from Hong Kong, Chan was taken from the hot embrace of her home to a whirlwind of destination in her early adulthood: a Mormon town in Utah, Windy Chicago, Little Rhody, New York, and old York. At the age of 17, she left home for the first time to attend a community college in the Amercian southwest. Her one escape from the culture shock of her new whitewashed world was a drawing class with a man who showed her what it means to be an artist.
“For local Hong Kong schools in my generation, the art training was very practical—all about technique. How can you paint a still life as realistically as possible in as short a time as possible? I never dreamed of being an artist when I started,” says Chan. “All I knew was that I liked to paint, but how would I carry that on outside of a school environment?”
None of Chan’s American classmates appreciated the arts, choosing to participate in athletics rather than taking arts classes at school. In fact, only one other student was enrolled in Chan’s class, but this companion never even showed up. The resulting one-on-one art lessons that Chan received were unlike anything she had experienced before. Rather than simply placing a still-life scene in front of her and leaving the room, Chan’s teacher drew alongside her from ten in the morning to four in the afternoon. He would critique her work with the intention of releasing her from the anxiety of doing art correctly.
Around 1999, her teacher suggested she attend an art school. Chan had heard that the School of the Art Institute of Chicago was a good choice, so she applied on a whim. It was the only art school that she applied to. When she was accepted, her parents expressed reluctance to allow her to study art, but Chan’s teacher called them personally to convince them of her path.
In Chicago, Chan joined the painting department. She took classes in printmaking, art history, and textiles. It wasn’t until her second year of graduate school at the Rhode Island School of Design that she experimented with sculpture for the first time.
Chan’s experience as a master’s student at RISD fulfills the classical vision of art school. When reflecting on her two years in the painting department in Providence, Chan cites the intention of all professors to break students down in order to build artists up. It was an intimidating environment, and everyone cried. Professors and external critics alike traveled from New York to openly assess the raw products of students’ vulnerabilities in regular studio critiques, lovingly termed “crits.”
Mixed media paintings filled the gallery walls of Chan’s first-year crits. Using fashion magazines as a source for collages, Chan cut and pasted select pieces of glossy paper onto panels for further manipulation. She removed all labels to maintain the out-of-context allure of elements such as texture, color, and font. With acrylic or oil paint, she then composed imaginative landscapes atop the collage base, often evocative of the science-fiction genre.
But beyond the visual magnetism of her work, discussions of the content and its meaning were unavoidable. Classmates and professors questioned Chan’s choice of material. They wanted to know why she used fashion magazines, and asserted that perhaps she was making a statement about consumerism. Chan realized that as long as she was using these magazines, she could not elude such conversations despite their irrelevance to her desire for producing the work. The magazines were also limiting in their physical dimensions. Scale could not be manipulated unless Chan scanned and reprinted the images that she wished to use, but she wanted to refrain from allowing such a technicality to control her process.
Chan began to question her own inclination for using magazines, and considered that maybe she was simply incapable of painting without the support of an image already created by someone else. She challenged herself to paint without collaging. With this prompt, her process evolved into something entirely new.
Rather than working in the realm of the two-dimensional, Chan began incorporating 3D paper models into her 2D work. Printed photographs of her models became the base for her paintings. Framing the photographs required her to both stage the small objects and also consider the background of the set. She began using other materials to create an environment for the models.
Professors responded to the successful adjustment by requesting to see Chan fail. They saw the comfort and control with which she produced her small-scale work, and prompted her to do something bigger. Receiving the feedback with an open mind, Chan recognized that at a multiplied scale, she would need to relinquish full control of the object, allowing mistakes to influence the course of the production process and ultimately the resulting piece of artwork.
“I remember the first sculpture that I made. I didn’t measure the size of the door and made a sculpture that I couldn’t get out of the studio. Then I used a saw to chop it in half,” she says.
Thus, her first sculpture quickly doubled, loudly announcing her entrance into the 3D art world. The styrofoam form with found objects lodged inside still rests in the basement of a friend’s apartment in New York from when it was first relocated after her RISD thesis show in 2008.
Post-graduation, she obtained an artist visa which allowed her to stay in the US for four more years. In that time, she moved to Brooklyn. She smiles when recalling risky memories of her time in Bushwick, before it was the mod place to be. Then, Chan lived in the countryside of York, England with her boyfriend. The artistic community was primarily comprised of young student artists. The more ambitious individuals hoping to break into the professional creative industry moved to London or Manchester, so Chan felt out of place.
“There was no dialogue,” she says. “I was just making work for myself, and it was quite isolating.”
When her boyfriend found a job in Hong Kong, Chan decided it was time to return to the city of sweat, smoke, and her sweetest memories—soon-to-be dreams.
Hong Kong holds a special place in Chan’s heart. She remembers the countless days of her childhood spent in the back room of her parents’ antique shop in Central, surrounded by boxes of stock and tools for repairing antiques. She recalls playing with packaging materials to pass the time with her sister, bringing full circle the story of her deep love for found materials. When she lived in the US, Chan never thought of antiques as art, but rather items that facilitated a means of making a living for her family.
When she eventually decided to return to Hong Kong for the precious company and knowledge of her parents, Chan began learning extensively about the art of the antique. She worked at the shop a few days a week, visited auction houses with her father, and learned how to weld from a metal worker who helped her parents make stands to display their products.
Chan’s father knows how to determine the authenticity of an antique by holding it in the palm of his hand, simply gazing and feeling. From him, she learned that details such as the glaze, chemicals, and weight can reveal the object’s style and dynasty of origin.
“Some people look at the objects as something with value—how much it is worth,” she says. “But [my father] sees something more than the object itself. He sees it as having a life on its own.”
This appreciation for objects beyond their functionality in the garden or the garage continues to inform Chan’s creative process. One of her most recently exhibited works, titled Spine, is installed along the edge of a wall within a gallery space in Wan Chai. The sculpture is composed of wheels that Chan found in a hardware shop in Sham Shui Po. The wheels are vertically arranged according to size, beginning with the smallest wheel near the ground and the largest near the ceiling. From afar, the piece appears to mimic the structure of a human spine.
The concept for the piece emerged while Chan wandered the streets of Hong Kong, searching for inspiration in hardware shops. Unlike the Home Depot in the United States, which Chan likens to a supermarket, Hong Kong is home to countless independent, family-owned businesses. Chan speaks fondly of the small spaces featuring objects that are often strangely arranged for practical or economic reasons. She sees beauty in the almost humorous manner of displaying loose parts; each shop has its own personality.
When her eyes landed on a metal shelf with the Spine wheels, she wondered what they would look like if they were to be stacked, and decided that she would have to make it herself to see. So she bought the wheels and began maneuvering them in her studio.
As with all her sculptures, Chan wanted to manipulate the objects while still conserving their original identity. Each wheel is covered in a handmade marbled clay, but the up-close recognition of the parts lends a whimsical quality to her work. However, the way in which she manipulates objects can vary greatly. Marbled clay, concrete barnacles, and resin-coated seashells are among the diversity of products which require techniques Chan was not introduced to in her painting programs at school. Instead, she learns from the Internet.
“Youtube tutorials—that’s my education,” she says. “You know, some really girly blogs teach you how to make jewelry out of clay. I learned from a teenage girl who used some glitter and resin to make a bangle for herself.”
Chan is fearless when it comes to utilizing industrial materials, eager to learn from anyone willing to share their experience with foreign machines and materials. In her studio, she proudly houses the beloved tools of a retired metalsmith, which she acquired after requesting and receiving welding lessons from him. The man’s handmade anvil, passed through his family for two generations, sits stoutly on her studio floor. Despite her thin frame, Chan can handle the tool expertly while donning a jet-black helmet and a flame-resistant suit embroidered with her name. Power tools line the walls above, and buckets of concrete rest on the shelf opposite the welding station. Chan’s impressive command of daunting materials and tools comes from a smattering of artistic influences, namely Eva Hesse, Louise Bourgeois, and Robert Gober.
“I’m always interested in artists who find their own way to use the material, and the material really belongs to them—like Eva Hesse,” says Chan. “She was making sculptures in the ‘70s, ’80s, when the US had latex and resin—these toxic materials that were very fragile.”
Hesse was unknown when she immigrated to the US from Germany, yet she married a famous sculptor and soon made a name for herself in New York. Chan admires Hesse’s success story, particularly when considering the male-dominated art world of that period. Hesse passed away at the age of 34 due to a brain tumor, speculated to have been a result of the unsafe handling of hazardous materials for her art. While this was undeniably a great loss, Chan chooses to preserve Hesse’s legacy in the sculptural sphere that they both have and do occupy.
At the time of our interview, Chan’s then-latest project sat like a sublime sweet in the entrance of her studio, begging for the eyes to consume it. The base was made of two varieties of styrofoam: a speckled type, white with black freckles like the flesh of a dragon fruit, and another more pure type, solid like large blocks of sugar. Two jade-tinted glass chairs crowned the base. According to a sketch on her desk, she planned on adding artificial concrete barnacles, seashells, and two lampshades as embellishment. The styrofoam would soon be filled with a mint-colored concrete. It was a luxurious sculpture, even in its incomplete state.
On September 21, Chan’s piece was presented in an exhibition at the UCCA Dune Art Museum which opened in late 2018. The sweeping, hollow concrete forms of the museum are carved into a sand dune on the coast of Qinhuangdao, China. It houses ten galleries, and a café featuring a wide aperture of the shore’s horizon. Chan’s sugary fruit throne rested in front of this café window, a stunningly symmetrical ornamentation to the seascape that it mimicked.
Chan’s concept for the sculpture manifested as a result of her casual engagement with the materials she had at hand. As always in her creative process, the sketch came second.
“I collect the objects—found objects. I only know that there’s potential,” she says. “There’s something that catches my attention, but I cannot articulate why or how I will use it.”
Based on how she responds to the material, Chan pairs it with complementary forms or textures found in other objects which she has either previously collected, or has yet to obtain. Trusting her intuition, her resulting process is utterly organic and unforced.
Chan’s creative process is potentially the very thing motivating her to live and work in a city that seems so senselessly suffocating. To an outsider, her return to Hong Kong for the sake of her sculptures may seem counterproductive and even self-destructive. However, she refuses to allow the physical limitations of Hong Kong to stop her from producing work. In fact, Chan asserts that she feels freer now, in the dense and spaceless city, than ever before.
In New York, she painted because she was always uncertain of the quantity of money and time she would have access to; she could not commit to the laissez-faire art of sculpture. In the English countryside, she did not have a studio or a charged community to facilitate her creation of sculptures. Now that she is back in Hong Kong, she has the ideal blend of resources, time, and support to do the work.
Chan has only occupied her current studio for a few months, and it already seeps with eye candy. Granted, she won’t be surprised if her currently admirable audacity becomes unsustainable within a year’s time. But rather than succumbing to the cultural and physical constraints of Hong Kong, Chan chooses to allow for the opening of worlds in her city. Perhaps her mindset can be sourced back to the philosophy of her parents’ antique shop, where a desire for production is necessary to sustain past lives. An object may serve its functional purpose in one lifetime, but any number of enhancing treatments may just lend it the energy to invigorate a space once more.