The Sydney artist reveals new work in a new gallery
The Sydney artist has walked away from her trademark aesthetic. But in its place, something much more ambitious is taking shape.
“I feel overstimulated all the time,” says Vicki Lee. The artist is attempting to describe the place her mind travels to when she encounters the colour yellow, but as with most sensations that occur on a subconscious level, she’s finding it challenging to sum up. “It’s like someone asking how you breathe,” she says with a smile. “You don’t really think about it because it just comes naturally. I guess putting on this show… I’m trying to encapsulate what I experience when I paint or see yellow. I guess it’s just me coming out of the weirdo closet.”
Korean-born, Sydney-based Lee is talking about the exhibition that will mark the opening of her second eponymous gallery space, a stone’s throw from Sydney’s Kings Cross. The show is called The Sound of Yellow, and it will play host to her most immersive work to date. The work is multidisciplinary, or multisensory, to be more precise. It brings together three sensations Lee often experiences in unison, like a chorus: smell, sound – or frequencies, as she describes it – and sight. The artist says painting the canvases, the visual element or the “expression”, is the easiest part.
“The canvas and I, we have a real thing together,” she says, a sparkle in her eye. “But everything I do around it facilitates what happens on the canvas, for sure.” More recently, she’s been experimenting with using mirrored perspex as her base, and resin instead of paint. These works will form the bulk of the show’s visual component. “I don’t put any gesso on my canvas, so it really absorbs all the water in the oil paint. Whereas the mirrors are the opposite. The resin slides across like liquid.”
The Sound of Yellow also marks a distinct departure from the series of works that gained Lee an international cult following: her floral series. A decade-long collaboration with her photographer husband Ted O’Donnell, the series consists of evocative, close-up portraits of flowers dripping with coloured paint. When Lee closed her last gallery in Surry Hills, she decided the end of that chapter would coincide with putting the work she’s best known for to bed.
“I get off on killing something when it’s at its peak beauty,” she admits. “The floral series… it was at its peak in terms of sales, or consumption, but I decided to kill it. And when I end something, I like to do it to the point of actual completion, to the point where I’m really destructing things.” Lee says integrity was behind her decision to kill her darling, a project that began on her and O’Donnell’s first date, and challenge herself to pursue “something bigger”.
“I don’t think integrity can exist in re-running prints that I made 10 years ago. And I say no to that every day. But also, there wouldn’t be any point in ending something if I didn’t also have the life force to continue.”
Serendipitously, around the same time Lee decided to “kill” her floral series, she was approached by Chanel and asked to create three works inspired by the iconic Chanel No. 5 fragrance, in celebration of its 100-year anniversary.
As she describes her plans for the new Vicki Lee Gallery, it becomes abundantly clear that Lee has no shortage of ambition. She hopes the gallery will bring a sense of dynamism to the art scene in Sydney. “There seems to be a big gap between the big government-run galleries and smaller galleries in Sydney,” she observes. The new space, she says, is “an investment [she’s] making to merge the gap”.
But the new Vicki Lee Gallery is unique in more ways than one. Housed inside a warehouse-style building most real estate agents would describe as “dilapidated”, the space boasts high, ornate ceilings and enormous windows, as well as concrete walls peeling with paint. “It used to be the backroom of this nightclub,” she says. “The space feels cool and ancient. But there’s also this darkness on the street that I like; it’s just part of what Kings Cross is. You stand out on the street on a Monday morning and you can really feel the energy of what’s happened over the weekend.”
For The Sound of Yellow, Lee has worked with a small network of collaborators on the smell and sound aspects of the exhibition. A bespoke scent, which will be “permeated through the space very subtly”, has been designed with Sydney-based nose Clayton Ilolahia. The artist says it captures her impression of a yellow smell. “It’s like that first hit of freshly cracked pepper, you know, how the bit that hits your nose, it’s kind of hot.”
The soundscape, meanwhile, has been composed in collaboration with cellist Kenichi Mizushima and pianist Bo Young Kwon. The way it’s amplified is the most extraordinary part of the exhibition. Beneath a six-by-three metre-long box, for which Lee has coined the term “cymatic structure”, sit two large subwoofers supplied by high-end audio technology manufacturer Genelec. Embedded in each corner of the structure are four sets of speakers. Lee chose subwoofers for their vibration factor. Her vision is for everyone who enters the space to sit or lie on the structure and feel connected by the frequency of the soundwaves. “You become the artwork,” she says, gesturing towards the box.
“I guess it’s not just painting that I’m interested in exploring. As an artist, I want to delve into different kinds of immersion. The show was born from having the guts to do it, to be honest. The idea has always been there. Because you know what? Sometimes I have this idea, like, we could die tomorrow. And it makes me do weird shit.”
