Lindy Lee

In Emanations, Susan Butler, Lindy Lee, and Arthur Renwick evoke the auras of their familial, cultural, and technological origins.

Lindy Lee’s Birth and Death (2003) consists of approximately one hundred Chinese accordion books. Each book features digitally altered family portraits, and each family member is represented at different stages of their lives. This intimate collection retraces a Chinese family’s history of displacement and redefinition within Australian culture.

These glowing photographic monuments capture the projective function of the beholder’s imagination.

Lindy Lee, born in Brisbane in 1954, is first-generation Chinese Australian. She is a practising Zen Buddhist whose PhD thesis explored identity and fluidity of selfhood. Major exhibitions of her work include the Biennale of Sydney, 1986; Edge to Edge: Contemporary Australian Art to Japan, 1988/89; Strangers in Paradise: Contemporary Australian Art to Korea, 1992; Prospect ’93 Kunstverein, Frankfurt; Photography Is Dead, 1996, and Spirit and Place, 1997, at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney; and Jia: House, Family, Home, Hong Kong Arts Festival, 2004. Lee teaches at the Sydney College of the Arts, University of Sydney.