First published in Artforum.
Text by Robin Peckham
Lost City and Other Stories: Objects and Diagrams
Michael Lee
23 July – 23 August
Hanart Square (Hanart TZ Gallery)
2/F, Mai On Industrial Building, 17-21 Kung Yip St.,
Kwai Chung, New Territories, Hong Kong
The relationship between architecture and art has been consistently tense since sculpture descended from the plinth, even when not dissected via the Klein group diagram à la Rosalind Krauss. As architects increasingly lean toward installation as a method of conceptual expression, renderings appear more and more like digital art; meanwhile, artists are reflecting on the forms of the built environment with little apprehension. The middle ground between sculpture and architecture has become ripe for rumination––particularly in greater China, where building practices reshape living environments at unprecedented speeds. Singaporean artist Michael Lee seizes the productive possibility of such crossover in his latest solo exhibition in Hong Kong, putting forward three recent projects concerned with the stability, so to speak, of construction.
For the project “National Columbarium of Singapore,” 2009, the artist has constructed delicate but never precious models of demolished buildings, though some represent creative schematics that never existed in the real world. The forty-five models, ranging from the National Junior College to the Singapore Centre for Daydreaming, present an ambitious documentation of a frequently intangible imagination of national identity. The series “Second-Hand City,” 2010–, consists of eight architectural drawings in an often humorous vernacular recalling that of comic books, each depicting a building that reflects on the anxiety complexes of architecture, from loneliness to demolition; the key image here, “Spiral Supermart (after Brodsky and Utkin),” mimics those “paper architects” by attempting to collect and resurrect fallen buildings for aesthetic purposes. More subtle and perhaps most impressive, “Monuments to Everything Else,” 2010–, riffs on architectural models by embedding certain structural features into the forms of books, as with an accordion binding that unfolds into a row of market stalls or a circuitry of plumbing that winds out from a centerfold. Lee continues to produce projects that actively function on various registers of affect and amusement, always approaching but never definitively concluding this project of the urban memorial.