Sunday June 19, 2011

Be wild and heard

By GEOFFREY YEOW

A hidden talent surfaces, with surreal charm and humour.

SURREALISM. It is a word that describes a form of artistic expression, a cultural perspective or even a seemingly unexpected situation.

For 53-year-old artist Lee Toon Hian, it is a case of all three, intertwined to form the very definition of his life, much like his detailed artworks depicting objects through his wildly imaginative and, oftentimes, surreal mind.

Hailing from the tin-mining city of Ipoh, Lee experienced a different sort of childhood from many other artists.

Secret passion: After years of drawing, Lee Toon Hian is holding his first solo exhibition.

Often, notable artists relive early hardship and suffering, drawing the strength to put their experiences on paper or canvas.

However, Lee grew up in a prominent industrialist Chinese family. And, being schooled in the prestigious St Michael’s Institution gave him a solid education and the opportunity to indulge in his own extra-curricular interest, which was putting his artistic thoughts on paper.

And indulge he did. Although drawing was somewhat a secret passion of Lee’s, he harnessed it well during his younger days with a few helping hands.

“I started drawing when I was 15 or 16. The art teachers at St Michael’s were very talented and dedicated. We started with the basics of art. They tried to make it interesting by asking us to bring a potato. We would cut it in half and then do pigment art. It started from there, then we moved onto Roman styles and other more advanced forms,” he recalls.

As with any traditional Chinese family in the 1970s, art was hardly considered a viable hobby, never mind a profession.

“Art to my parents was always an extra thing. If it was a pencil or pen for studies, then, of course, they would buy it. But a paint brush? It was no, no, no!

“I had to use my own money to buy my equipment. My allowance at that time was about 10 to 20 cents a day. So, to buy a brush took me a week,” says Lee.

After finishing secondary school, he furthered his studies in law at the University of Stirling in Scotland but kept his artistic passion to just random doodles (or, as he humorously calls it, “doodoos”). But it was during his time in the United Kingdom, surrounded by art itself, that his interest grew.

“I made a lot of friends who shared what I saw in the fine arts. From Japanese to Norwegian to Canadian, there were 12 of us in this little art society. We visited the smallest to the biggest museums and exhibitions in the UK. As for my drawings, I would just doodoo whatever I thought was interesting. That was the slang back then, doodoo ... perhaps it has changed now.”

Following the completion of his law studies, Lee returned to local shores after receiving news that his father was sick. Since his brothers were busy with their own careers, his father gave him an ultimatum – take over the reins of the family’s construction business or fold it up.

As any well-brought-up son would do, Lee chose the former. However, during his years of developing the business, he continued to draw his musings and build on the style that he had witnessed countless times during his years abroad.

“My biggest influences were Michelangelo and Dali. When I walked into the Sistine Chapel with these amazing artworks on the walls and the ceilings, it just gave me a sense of what classical art is all about.

“But the person that I look up to the most is definitely Salvador Dali. He was the master of surrealism. It’s all about art that shocks the mind and works with the element of surprise, which is something I always love to do,” he says.

After years of keeping his works a private indulgence, Lee recently agreed to exhibit his drawings for the very first time.

His debut solo, entitled Bewildered, opened at Wei-Ling Gallery in Kuala Lumpur last week.

His works for the show depict mostly humans and animals, in painstaking detail, with each drawing telling its own story.

Employing strokes created using mostly fine Chinese calligraphy brushes, Lee succeeds in blending both East and West influences in his artistic style with his unique form of deft surrealism and charming naiveté.

In his drawing titled Bewildered, three horses stare out at the viewer with eyes of shock and confusion. With the piece placed beside the aptly-named Horse Trading at the gallery, the cold humour of confused horses wondering about their impending fate comes to life through Lee’s poetic brushstrokes, which tell a story as vividly as any book .

Over the years his style has changed somewhat, but what remains is his keen eye, which zeroes in on fascinating details in the most obscure places.

“Nowadays I don’t travel that much, so I just watch CNN and Animal Planet. And if anything fascinates me, I draw. One picture I did was of Saddam Hussein’s statue, where his own people pulled it down. You could never imagine the collapse of Saddam, so the symbolism was very interesting.

“I just see something in front of my eyes and I know it is something significant. That is when I draw it,” he says.

As unlikely as his journey has been, Lee’s natural understanding of his unique art form and his ability to give a fresh look to an aging face will undoubtedly render many local art critics “bewildered” as to where this talent has been all these years.

Bewildered is on show at Wei-Ling Gallery (No. 8, Jalan Scott, Brickfields, Kuala Lumpur) until July 2. For more information, call 03-2260 1106 or go to weiling-gallery.com/bewildered.php.