Earthly Evocations:
Indonesian Art Now

17 May - 17 June 2012

Curatorial Notes | The Artists
Lie Fhung

by Valerie C. Doran ©2012

Lie Fhung was born in Jakarta, Indonesia in 1969 to a Chinese émigré father and a sixth-generation Chinese-Indonesian mother. As a child she showed such a prodigious talent for drawing that her parents arranged for classes with the painter Abdul Rachman, who later recommended her to study fine arts at the Bandung Institute of Technology in West Java. While at the institute Fhung developed a strong interest in ceramics and undertook studio classes with A.J. Irianto, whom she considers as an important mentor. She also had the opportunity to study with the dynamic painter and performance artist Tisna Sanjaya.

After graduating, Fhung found herself grappling with questions of artistic and cultural identity, which stymied her creative work. She left Indonesia to work as a designer in Shanghai and eventually settled in Hong Kong, where she began to work independently in digital media design. Like Tisna, Fhung’s engagement in activities beyond the pure scope of art helped her to forge a network of connectivity that has conversely inspired her artmaking processes. Fhung describes herself as being interested ‘in tensions between the private and the public, between the individual and society, and between what lies beneath and what is shown on the surface.’ In her digital scrapbooking business, she was privileged to gain insight into the small visual histories that women, especially mothers, created for themselves and their families, and in her role as an artist she explored with them the question of what is hidden from these histories, an exploration that influenced her on-going multi-media project To Breed or Not to Breed (2005 -). A major installation of this period, Flight, embodies the delicate tactile sensibility that infuses much of her work. Comprised of pairs of small, porcelain wings, each suspended within a wire cage-frame without bars, it also symbolizes a key theme: that individual freedom, or its perceived lack, is ultimately dependent on one’s own state of mind. In her interactive installation Freedom is a Collaborative Effort, the wings are made from hand-embossed woven metal sheets, suspended from a tangled system of connected wires and manipulated by single pulls attached to each one. To set freedom in motion, all one has to do is make the effort to reach out and pull.


Freedom Is A Collaborative Effort  | Brass, Stainless Steel Wire, Silk Thread | 200x200x250 cm | Lie Fhung©2011
Freedom Is A Collaborative Effort | Brass, Stainless Steel Wire, Silk Thread | 200x200x250 cm | Lie Fhung©2011

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