Artist Statement
Chia LEE
Version April 2025
My art explores the fluidity and the continuity between humans and non-humans. This is an essential subject of our era, sitting right in the core of all the “-zations” that makes the world as it is today: modernization, industrialization, globalization, capitalization, and colonization.
When I say non-humans, I mean all the existences in this world, living or not, in contact with humans or not: animals, plants, microbes, rocks, rivers, stars, galaxies, light, dust. When I say fluidity and continuity, it is about how we identify and place ourselves: Are we a part of the nature or not? Do we feel included, connected, accepted by the environment that physically contains us? Are we among or above? Do we feel an equal depth in ourselves as in the tree in front of us, or in the sick scruffy cat in the neighborhood that just lost his battle? Or in a weathered oil barrel at a seaport, in the solar wind that brushes over our planet at the closest approach point?
It is about respect and empathy, and at the same time, beyond respect any empathy. The majority of humans today inherited an opposition between Nature and Culture in the stream of Western thinking born from the encounter of Greek philosophy with the transcendence of monotheisms. This opposition in turn creates hierarchy and fosters the tendency of seeing non-humans as objects rather than subjects. If humans could learn that we are actually among but not above, modernization, industrialization, globalization, and capitalization would not necessarily lead to exploitation. If certain humans had learned that they were among but not above, colonization would never have occurred.
Beyond respect any empathy, I seek for a reconciliation, a genuine experience of living as part of the greater whole. A whole as one inseparable, harmonious yet diversified existence that contains you, me, us, the tulip on my table and the fish fillet in your fridge; the clay that formed the brick composing my house and the rubber sap that became your car tires; the water flowing through the creek in the highlands and the sewage of the restaurant next door; the celestial bodies that provides us with light and heat, rhythm and poetry; and the virus that kills.
All existences in our time-space form a network of continuity that glitters in constant dynamic. We are all linked by an enormous web of I-don’t-know-how-many-dimensions, where borders are blurred, elements interdependent and entangled.
Yet it is not only the matter of physical existences, often represented by a utilitarian view that lack of respect towards the environment will eventually backfire on humans. It is a matter of mindset, a matter of how to identify ourselves in the deepest level. In ancient Taoism philosophy, 天 (“Sky”) symbolizes the collective existence of all that lies beyond oneself, while 人 (“Human”) designate the individual ego. Human consciousness separates us from the world, and art making is the path of a possible reconciliation and reunion between humans and the sky (天人合一). Through beauty we live, and through poetry we step into a cloud of nuance where we are allowed to shed our human presence, traveling afar and be mesmerized.
If creation is the opening of oneself to the world through the revelation of a singular point of view, it seems spontaneous that in my artwork, I unveil humans who have double existences, who live a continuity outside of their physical selves. Humans can at the same time be trees, birds, fish, dragons, rocks, buildings, flowing water, chilling air and anything in between. And in turn, they can become us. This reflects what happens in my life and in how I see the world: across multiple times, multiple places, multiple identities, multiple species. Exchange, mixture, transition, between-the- lines, hors-champs. Not omnipresent, but ubiquitous.