Sia Sang Bok Lee’s works are almost always textural, espying fragmented patches of the cosmos, sprayed and whittled into variegated, shifting scales. Her canvases are “world-building” exercises where we are privy to an adumbrated palette of lavender-verdant-maroon parcels, aligned in a stippled scattered perspective. There are no humans or animals. There are no trees or bushels. There is no evident sign of purposive lifeforms. Rather, Lee gives us worldly forms that, although sapped of vitalistic natural agents, are organic. How can one depict organic forms without any organic creatures? Lee achieves this by presenting the sweeping, slow ripples of galactic views. The pictureplane bends, always slowly, like hills that bend in on themselves. There are horizontal bands and flecked spots that suggest the motley presence of light. Granted, the works might readily depict organic elements closely observed, i.e. a microcosm, or several universes from afar (i.e., a cosmos). This “problem of scales” need not be solved—in fact it is better left unsolved, for the ambiguity allots free-floating referentiality, which canalizes optical sensuousness.

Lee purposes both Hanji paper and canvas as a base, which allows for optical tactility and depth—for light to swell. Lee’s handling of lambent surfaces engages the subjective quality of light. This is the very quality that, Mark Rothko, in his Generalization since the Renaissance essay, called "light impressionism"; chronicling its developmental history and Leonardo da Vinci’s great discovery, Rothko writes that:

[…] Leonardo discovered […] the subjective quality of light. In short, by means of this method, which he employed in so fragmentary a form, he introduced a plastic element that was to constitute the basis of plastic romanticism. That plastic device was to serve for the next five centuries as the basis of the expression of the subjective quality. Plastically, light impressionism made it possible to push space back further and give tactility to the intervening atmosphere. We must note here that the development of this device was really the product of a new technical advance. Leonardo alone among the great Florentines began to experiment with oil paints, and it was this new medium that made it possible to render the infinite nuances of forms passing from light into darkness, to give tactility to atmosphere, and to introduce a sort of haze or smoke whereby atmosphere could be achieved.

Lee is not a painter of verisimilitude of facsimile, putting her work in a distinct tradition that may, at first gloss, appear to be quite distinct from Leonardo’s. But, in Lee’s surfaces, the breadth of light is dramatized by a smoothed-over, limned facture, of hazed coral pinks, plum purples, and occasional breakages of green and red shards.

Maneuvering the earth’s form, Lee synthesizes an oblique light source with surrounding adumbral darkness. This is not chiaroscuro but, like chiaroscuro, attends to the principle of light-based juxtaposition. Given the works’ titles and their earthly surfaces, it would be inappropriate to call these paintings “non-objective abstractions”. Although they betray an expressionistic quality, Lee’s “light impressionism” is quite distinct from the non-objective field paintings well known to us from Gottlieb, Rothko, Baziotes, and Kamrowski. After all, Lee is depicting light sources as they would materialize in a non-Euclidean semblance. There is a rich tradition of non-Euclidean worldbuilding and the “fourth dimension”, which includes Pyotr Ouspenskii’s Tertium organum (1912), Buckminster Fuller dymaxion maps, Duchamp’s Large glass, and Roberto Matta’s le cube ouvert. Duchamp and Matta were both particularly interested in depicting the moment of spatial and narratival change. Although Lee’s works are, stylistically, worlds apart from Matta’s surrealism (and Duchamp’s adumbration), she also depicts the bending fragments that capture earthy change, spotlighting this “turn” with radiance and phosphorescence.

Her textural use of paint gives relief-like texture to the breakage of light from the background shadow. But where Kamrowski and other American field painters’ swirling, swallowed forms projected felt phenomenology or mythologized symbols of the unconscious, Lee’s spatial allusions remain somewhat naturalistic—albeit this is nature, planetary or microscopic, disrobed from its inhabitants.

In the aforementioned essay, Rothko writes that:

Leonardo’s discovery […] made it possible to unify the picture tactilely through having all the objects partake of a common enveloping atmosphere, as well as to provide a tactile means for the representation of sensuality. Heretofore chiaroscuro called attention to each particular object and every part of the object with an insistent force which divided rather than unified the composition. But Leonardo’s method created a permeating tactile medium in whose essence all objects participated.

Again, Lee does not make use of chiaroscuro but, utilizing a related painterly principle, handles the juxtaposition of light and dark through a contained but brilliantly galvanized set of colors. This is a relatively novel breakthrough in her work, though she has long pursued organic motifs. For instance, her Cosmos series from 2021 uses ovular shaped canvases reminiscent of Elliott Puckette’s. Like Puckette, Lee’s works suggest organic structures, though Lee’s depict swirling cosmic glances where Puckette treats the wandering lines of an ascemic language.

Lee’s stippled, quasi-pointillist galaxies also recall dot eye exams bereft of numbers. She prods her motley surfaces into the direction of a skyscape. The world-building exercise results in a celestial abstraction—a de-peopled world observed without ordinary planetary fixtures. Thus, there is a continuity that reverberates throughout Lee’s work. Consider, for example, her 2018 Relationship of life series; these works present the desiccated earth’s crackles and clay-brown veins, fragmented elements woven into an array. Other mixed-media on canvas works suggest cellular metabolism. In all instances, organicity is the through-line. This is also apparent in the figure/ground relationship made literal in the Heaven and Earth (2000) series, where swelling clouds (i.e., the eponymous “heaven”) blossoms from the terra firma, rendered in silhouette.

This is a mere sampling of Lee’s art practice. She has been painting for quite a while, plumbing relationships of organicity. In keeping with her early series, Lee’s recent works like Encounter with the stars croon towards the possibility of the heavens, albeit deracinated from the ground that would make its presence literal. Thus, wafting in ambiguity, the surfaces remain more topological, weaving a fabric of rippled shores and clouds—indeed, Lee has a stark penchant for ripples, giving us just enough indication with her perspective-titling practice.

Lee also formidably handles paint. Not all celestial abstractionists came weave with light, sewing it with the ground’s belts, bends, and serpentine turns. Lee is never gratuitous with illumination. She instead grants our glances us pockets of breath through that which is lit. Lee’s is undoubtedly a poetic practice—punctilious, meditative, and tightly considered.

(Text by Ekin Erkan)