TOKYO — Hong Kong-born artist Lee Kit is currently holding a solo exhibition at Shiseido Gallery entitled “The Voice Behind Me,” which runs through July 26, 2015.Born in Hong Kong in 1978 but now based in Taipei, Lee is one of Asia’s most keenly watched contemporary artists. He was selected as the winner of the Art Futures Award at Art HK in 2012, before being chosen to represent Hong Kong at the Venice Biennale in 2013. This year, Lee showed at the Sharjah Biennial, and is currently preparing for solo exhibitions at the S.M.A.K. Museum of Contemporary Art in Ghent and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis in 2016.Lee’s installations frequently incorporate slight, innocuous, and seemingly self-effacing paintings on pieces of cloth and cardboard, strategically positioned within installations made of furniture, lights, and other domestic objects. A faint sense of claustrophobia and repressed anxiety surrounding the persistent demands and stresses of urban living hang over his work, although Lee also draws frequently on the associative connotations of everyday household brands and products, giving his work a faint whiff of the romantic readymade, as it were.This exhibition at Shiseido Gallery showcases around ten works including “Scratching the table surface” (2006-11), a seemingly flippant record of Lee’s finger idly scratching the surface of his table at home, representative past pieces, as well as a selection of new cloth and cardboard paintings and videos that have been studiously positioned with the gallery. “The Voice Behind Me” embodies a subdued refinement that promises to resonate rather differently in the context of Tokyo’s post-bubble economy, rather than the perpetually frothy atmosphere of his native Hong Kong.Lee Kit’s “The Voice Behind Me” runs at Shiseido Gallery from June 2 through July 26, 2015.Follow @ARTINFOJapan
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