Endless Metamorphosis - Press Release

Drawn upon the ever-changing characteristics of nature, Leroy Lee dedicates his art to interpreting the emotional bonds between humans as well as the time and space we live within. Endless Metamorphosis is a solo exhibition of Lee that comprehensively overviews his transforming and increasingly diversified endeavors from 2014 to 2018 that explore the ever-changing environment and human nature relationship.

Continuing the previous solo exhibition Mindful Sojourner, the initial inspiration for this exhibition originated from the artist’s seeking a sense of belonging after living in a foreign place for many years, in hope to find an intersection between the two sides of the Pacific Ocean. In different periods of the past years, Lee has sailed out into the ocean from Taiwan and the United States, when it was cloudy or sunny, at day or night. Lee fathomed the beating hearts of people from centuries ago when they first saw a new continent on the ocean or when they left their homelands. In the contrast of gradually approaching and gradually fading away, in the various and magnificent scenes, the vague fragments of images in the slow sailing forward and departing from land were assembled.


As Lee translates his experiments to the canvas, he employs fictional light contrast to render the intense conflicts in chiaroscuro. Rendering, glazing, and almost mechanically regular (horizontal and vertical) brushstrokes on the surface keep moving and intersecting, creating differences in layers, thereby increasing the rich tension in the picture. He also integrated the main subject with the background space, creating an unrealistic realism with a form and yet formless. In the meantime, the painting is overlapped with layered and scraped off translucent and opaque layers of colors; the formation and disappearance of texture is a delicate process of multiple hiding and presentation. Hoping to echo the vastness of the land, Lee ingeniously utilizes grayscale of various levels instead of leaving blankness in his illustration of the “void.” This minimalist presentation of color and the concise brushstrokes sought a poetic multi-dimensional space visually.