Deepening its long-standing commitment to Asia, Lehmann Maupin will participate in the inaugural edition of Art SG with a focused presentation of works from three women artists, Mandy El-Sayegh, Tammy Nguyen, and Lee Bul, all of whom work to engage communal and personal histories that reflect the intertwining cultures of Asia. The artists share an interest in process-based practice, which manifests in a distinctly layered, narrative aesthetic that permeates each oeuvre. The presentation in Booth BH06 serves to elucidate these specific parallels, and at the same time offers a broad survey of Lehmann Maupin's global program, including works by McArthur Binion, Liza Lou, Lari Pittman, Jennifer Steinkamp, and more.
Mandy El Sayegh’s oeuvre explores the compounding nature of information. Created through the assemblage of material and hand-painted markings, these works represent the process of trapping, distilling, and retaining knowledge or data; they capture both intended meaning and happenstance association. The artist roots her highly process-driven practice in an exploration of material and language as a means of investigating the formation and break-down of bodily, linguistic, and political systems of order. In several new works presented at the fair, El-Sayegh engages imagery pertaining to the body in order to explore the relationship between self-representation and biological and societal structures. El-Sayegh’s work is on view through September 2023 in the group exhibition “Women Defining Women in Contemporary Art of the Middle East and Beyond" at LACMA. Her next solo exhibition will open at Lehmann Maupin New York in April 2023.
Tammy Nguyen bases her practice in the process of narrative development. Her pictorial storytelling aims to unsettle; Nguyen’s elegant forms and accordant aesthetics belie the nature of her content, which often subverts what are otherwise harmonious compositions. This dissonance gives rise to a generative viewing process where complacency is dislodged and where space for reevaluation and radical is opened. In a new painting, Nguyen explores the Bandung conference—the first large-scale Afro-Asian conference attended by world leaders from 29 non-aligned countries during the Cold War. Nguyen will open her first solo exhibition with the gallery in Seoul in March 2023.
Similarly, Lee Bul’s process-driven practice draws inspiration from numerous literary, cinematic, and architectural sources to visually articulate states of upheaval or transition. Among the selection of Bul’s painting and sculpture presented at the fair are recent Perdu paintings. Composed of multi-layered organic and inorganic materials like mother of pearl and acrylic paint, these works depict otherworldly and fragmented cyborg-like bodies, suspended in space at various distances and in differing detail. These undefined forms emerge from brightly-hued fields of color as if proliferating or expanding; they inhabit a liminal space between biology and technology. In this way, the artist’s Perdu works gesture towards both a yearning for completeness and an unspecified yet proximate process for achieving this cohesive state.
Other highlights include works from Do Ho Suh’s Specimen series, which he recently exhibited in New York. More Specimen works are currently on view in artist’s first solo exhibition in the Southern Hemisphere at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney; Lari Pittman’s Luminous: Cities with Egg Monuments 3 (2022), on the heels of his solo exhibition at Museo Jumex in Mexico City; a recent Liza Lou work in celebration of her recent self-titled monograph, published by Rizzoli; and Jennifer Steinkamp’s video installation Madame Curie 3 (2011).