Design and Art Australia Online

Lindy Lee was born in Brisbane, the daughter of refugees from Communist China. Her father had come to Australia before the Communist victory. Her mother remained in China with her first two sons, unable to come to Australia for some years because of the racist White Australia policy.
After her parents were reunited again the family settled in Brisbane where Lindy Lee was born. For many years she internalized the situation where she was the only Asian child in an all-white neighbourhood.
When she looked at art all the great works by men, so rather than aspiring to be an artist, she became a high school art teacher. In 1975 she graduated from Kelvin Grove CAE, and travelled to London. It was in the art museums of Europe that she saw the work of Artemisia Gentileschi, and realised that it was both possible and reasonable for a woman be an artist. She studied first at the Chelsea College of the Arts, before returning to Australia where she enrolled in a Bachelor of Visual Art in the Sydney College of the Arts. Her works of this period drew heavily on photocopies of reproductions of Renaissance Art, especially Gentilieschi.
Her interest in the nature of photocopies as objects in their own right led to further manipulation of the copied images. This evolved into covering photocopied images in black wax, then scraping them back to reveal the iconic work underneath. In 1985 James Mollison saw an exhibition that included her work and purchased White Sacrament for the National Gallery.
For many years her art was focused exclusively on the European tradition, especially in critiquing Renaissance and Baroque Old Masters.
In the early 1990s Lee started to come to terms with her dual heritage, the China of her ancestors and the Australia of her upbringing.
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Writers:

Date written:

2020

Last updated:

2020