About the Artwork
Labyrinths (Barriers Closer to the Shore) is part of a key body of work that takes its cues from the ways we navigate our varied physical and political geographies, and how the language and architecture of walls and fencing become signs of authority and power.

Walls and fences offer security as well as entrapment, privacy but also control, navigation as well as punishment. In these works, Wee recalls the fence that shape the line on the Padang for Lee Kuan Yew’s wake, the cage that is the emergent sign of new regulations around Hong Lim Park, as well as the extensive fencing of Singapore’s beaches and shores against illegal landing.

Wee’s panels rework the familiar municipal green fence as written pages filled with the signs and the affect of our current polarized polity. Simultaneously sculptures and paintings, these panels incorporate photographs, prints, paintings as well as text based material, each panel forming a legible page that can be read. The artist is particularly interested in the signs of polarization as well as the poetics of powerlessness and impasse.

About the Artist
Jason Wee (b. 1979, Singapore) is an artist and a writer working between art, architecture, poetry and photography. His art practice contends with sources of polyphony and powerlessness. He transforms these histories and spaces into various visual and written materials. He is keenly interested in their secrets and their futures, their idealisms and their conundrums. Wee is the founder and director of Grey Projects, an artists’ space, library and residency that focuses on curatorship, new writing, design propositions and art. Wee has exhibited at the Chelsea Art Museum (NY, USA), Casino Luxembourg (Luxembourg), Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen (Germany), Singapore Art Museum, and ArtScience Museum amongst others. Artistin-residencies include ZK/U Berlin, Artspace Sydney, Tokyo Wonder Site, Contemporary Art Japan, NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore, Gyeonggi Creation Center, Korea, amongst others. He was a 2005-2006 Studio Fellow at the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program, and was awarded the Young Artist Award for visual arts in Singapore in 2008 and the Voters’ Prize from the Singapore Art Museum in 2009. Wee is currently an Artist-in-Residence at the Silver Arts Project, World Trade Center, New York, USA.

Wee is represented by Yavuz Gallery.

Artwork and profile images courtesy of the Artist and Yavuz Gallery