Weekend Portfolio: Elizabeth Gabrielle Lee
Were you a flower to tuck away?
I grew up on a diet of Disney and Carl’s Jr. Apart from having Chinese dishes at home, the rest of my childhood was spent consuming the West: DK encyclopaedias, McDonald’s drive throughs, and Enid Blyton. I grew up wanting to emulate the fair-skinned lady on TV; it wasn’t just her appearance I was after—her lifestyle inhabited my subconscious. I rejected my Peranakan heritage almost completely in my teenage years—it was too familiar to be desired, and it just wasn’t ‘exotic’ enough. A decade later and here I am, stringing remains together, retrieving forgotten memorabilia from what feels like a past life. Reactivating the photographs of my grandmother’s funeral, I attempt to bridge the time-space gap with that of my own images. Hours spent threading chrysanthemums (a Chinese symbol of loss and healing) developed into a journey of contemplation on a salvaged heritage—imagined or not.
Elizabeth Gabrielle Lee Elizabeth Gabrielle Lee is a Singaporean-born, London-based artist, researcher and writer. Her work navigates the nuances and intricacies that arise out of history and memory. Meditating on fractured and lost traditions, themes of displacement and nostalgia weave in and out of her storytelling. Through visual and textual interventions, she attempts to undo constructs of knowledge production and retention. Remapping a singular history, micro and muted narratives are brought to light, steering narratives toward alternate and fluid territories.
Lee also runs XING, a research platform centered on the poetics and politics of Southeast and East Asian art discourse. Assuming form of a shapeshifter, it morphs between localities and temporalities; with(in)flux. A domain of not-yet possibilities, the platform attempts to dismantle matrices concerned with the region from non-dominant perspectives.
To view more of Elizabeth’s work, visit her website here.
