EXHIBITED:
The Struggle between Space and Sentiment: Reed Lee , Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Taipei, July 9-September 25, 2011

ILLUSTRATED:
Reed Lee-True Freedom Lies in Subtlety , Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Taipei, 2011, color illustrated, p. 45

The important post-war veteran Taiwanese artist Reed Lee was born in 1921 in to a scholarly family in Jiangsu Province surrounded by poetry, literature, books, paintings, antiques and Beijing opera. They provided him with nourishment in Chinese culture and art. When the Sino-Japanese War broke out in 1937, Reed Lee went to Sichuan as an exiled student. He graduated from the Chongqing University in 1945 and came to Taiwan in 1948. In contrast to members of modern painting movements such as Fifth Moon Group and Ton Fon Art Group at the time, Reed Lee did not receive professional art training. However, with his passion for literature and art, he started studying painting with veteran artist Mr. Chen Te-wang (1910-1984). During his eight years of study (1956-1964), Chen guided Reed Lee in his exploration of space, which would last his entire life.

To Reed Lee, creation was an endless conversation between man, "heaven" (nature) and "history", involving a process of the condensation of learning and the sublimation of life. After mastering figuration, Reed Lee turned to "abstraction" from 1973, creating layers of rich textures with vigorous brushwork and thick paint, and often using lines of poetry as titles. In 1983, Reed Lee returned to the exploration of "dots" and the study of "modeling" in Chinese ink painting. Before starting his late series "Attribute of Emptiness" in 1989, Reed Lee depicted his layered inner landscapes and images with powerful brushwork, dots and lines.

One day in 1989, after images of his studio and models emerged in Reed Lee's subconscious, he created a series of 22 works entitled "Attribute of Emptiness". He once explained that they are depictions of actual "space", the emptiness of the impermanent world, as well as the genuine emptiness and wondrous presence of solemn Buddha images. His painting style changed from heavy and gloomy to light and clear. His "dots" also became more refined and fused with the colours, achieving a balance between sentiment and rationality . (Wu Kwang-tyng, Director of Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Harmony between Sentiment and Rationality, Deep Cultivation
Lies in Joy-Reed Lee , Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Taipei, 2011, p. 7)

The attribute of emptiness has three levels: The first level is the object seen by the eyes, existing in a specific space. The second level is object transformed to self, objective phenomena transformed into perception of life. People may internalize the myriad objects of the external world, transforming them into a part of their life, creating personalized, vitalized objects. The third level is mutable, impermanent individual life, sublimated to transcend individuality and surpass the ordinary reality of space and time. Here, the boundaries between the artistic realm and the religious realm no longer remain valid. The attribute of emptiness governs all three levels, and its highest state accords with "true emptiness and wondrous presence." Here we must explain that although the preceding characterization is clearly divided into levels, when it comes to expression as a series of paintings, "Attribute of Emptiness" follows a different track of formal development.

This draft that had been grasped in a dream revealed the ultimate order of painting. And painting with oil became the practical action and discipline through which the painter gradually approached and embodied this ultimate order within the flow of time. The series "attribute of Emptiness" gradually unfolded within the mutual dialectical process between these two staring points and materials.

Reed Lee was unquestionably quite familiar with the postimpressionist development of Western art. In his conversations and memoirs he made frequent mention of a deep appreciation for such masters as Paul Cézanne (1839-1906) and Alberto Giacometti (1901-1966). This paper will consider one British artist, Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775-1851), who worked both in oil and watercolor, in an attempt to explore one source of inspiration for Lee's painting style, and its connection to the Attribute of Emptiness series.

The similarities between Reed Lee's paintings and the later-era painting style of Turner include: (1) the development of a form of expression verging on the abstract, based on landscapes, and seascapes in particular; (2) circular structures similar to halos; (3) literary and richly lyrical painting titles; (4) color tones tending toward a single color; and (5) and "oil sketching" style leaving behind traces of the brushstroke to produce an unfinished effect. These points of similarity may also be seen as the hall marks of Reed Lee's painting style, forms of expression adopted in order to "create a state of lyricism." Nevertheless, what must be noted is that this paper does not intend to deduce from these similarities that Turner had a direct influence on Lee, but rather, based on these observations, to advance the following perspective: In his artworks Reed Lee bended and amalgamated Eastern and Western art, culture and tradition, and his sources of inspiration may have been broader and more diverse in scope that most people recognize. (Lin Sheng-chih, Assistant Research Fellow, The Institute of History and Philology, Academia Sinica, The Genealogy of "Attribute of Emptiness", Deep Cultivation Lies in Joy-Reed Lee, Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Taipei, 2011, p. 51, 56, 60, 61)