The myth is the foundation of life...into which life flows when it reproduces its traits out of the unconscious. – Thomas Mann

What is it with women and their love for deconstructing myths, fairy tales, and nursery rhymes? Is it simply a strategic response to the oppressive, ideological assumptions about women in these texts? Or do women just derive a more instinctive pleasure from such traditional narratives than men? Perhaps I am unknowingly treading off the path of political correctness here onto the unfavourable ground of sexist generalisations. I prefer to think I am not. Besides artists, how many more female writers and poets than male ones are prominently and imaginatively peeling the lids off these texts to expose all that power-play and naturalised inequalities seething within the seemingly innocent stories and rhyming couplets?

In Sandra Lee’s exhibition, Did Ever You See Such A Thing In Your Life, the same love for such time-honoured nursery rhymes pulls the artist by her hand toward the logical conclusions of unhesitant deconstruction and the incorporation of seemingly disjunctive cultural references, and unsettling signifiers to a complex, mental landscape. The aspirations toward what André Breton had termed “an absolute reality”, a “surreality” conflating both fantasy and dreams with the everyday world, is evident throughout. However, are such features of her works really so easily categorisable? When does reality truly end and surreality begin? The shoe with its connotations of feet-binding in “Who Lived In A Shoe” visually conflates both the physical object and its symbolism. The shoe looks comically big enough to hold not more than one oppressed female figure. This is the key to the work’s disturbing impact. The objects we utilise in our everyday lives already carry the symbolic meanings we may or may not choose to engage with. Such art takes this one step further and forces the viewer to stand before the concretisation of such relationships between the thing and the semiotics of the thing, opening up questions about the problematics of meaning and ideology.

It is true that such questions have already been rigorously tackled in the past, but then the re-formation of such questions has always been the point. One might also be tempted to relate Lee’s work to what Julia Kristeva had called the “semiotic chora”, a pre-Oedipal stage before an individual enters what Lacan has termed the “Symbolic Order”, which, for feminists like Kristeva, is a simultaneous entry into patriarchy. As a form of experimentation, the semiotic chora is linked to the impetus to inscribe femininity at the moment of the discovery of masculine forms. In écriture féminine, this surfaced in the form of play, delays, disruption, excess, linguistic and grammatical subversion. In Lee’s artwork, the disruptions and the subversions are recognisably linked to the antechamber of her unconscious to subconscious feelings and desires.

This is immediately clear in such pieces as “Can’t See Me” and “Has Lost Her Sheep”, where the motif of that girl in a chair raising a hand to her brow as if to better see something in the distance. This girl as a motif recurs significantly and the motivations behind this stay as nearly hidden as the features on the girl’s face. Her facelessness brings to mind Japanese horror movies that smack of that age-old apprehension of the female as the fearful and unknowable Other. Another motif, that of the hands coming together to mime a bird flying, is more than just whimsical when the hands are inhumanly grey, or when one such “bird” seems to fly downwards in “The Other Side” (see picture), as if it might actually be crashing (like the grandfather clock in “The Clock Struck One”), or a bad omen coming in to land, like the crow that frightened Tweedledee and Tweedledum from their quarrel.

The idiosyncratic inclusion and repetition of such startling motifs, whether foregrounded or not, as well as the troubled emotionality of the backdrops to those nursery rhyme characters (see “Hey Diddle Diddle” or “When The Bough Breaks”) further emphasise the more ineffable and subconscious intentions of the artist; as the girl in the chair seems to stare in the distance with close to no eyes, the act of seeing stems suggestively from someplace further inward than mere lens and iris, and the viewer is perhaps encouraged to look at Lee’s work from a similarly inward perspective, maybe even one step shy of your own insanity.

Most prominent are the two series of works, “Had Spoiled His Nice New Rattle” and “Just Then Flew Down A Monstrous Crow”, supposedly inspired by the nursery rhyme, Tweedledee and Tweedledum. The dark washes in some of the pieces are immediately contrasted to the brighter versions, particularly in the latter series, which is far more interesting than the former set of works. The bulbous figures bloated into actual hot-air balloons cradling Chinese gold ingots grin like Yue Minjun’s smiling men, except there is not the impossibly long rows of eerily perfect teeth. However, Tweedledee and Tweedledum are no less creepy with their essentially unknowable significations rich as the gold they bear forth like seemingly generous gifts.

The more one observes Lee’s work, the less one thinks of nursery rhymes.


The exhibition took place at the Jendela gallery, Esplanade - Theatres on the Bay from 16 Jan - 08 Feb 2004. This was Sandra Lee's first solo exhibition after "Just Then Flew Down A Monstrous Crow" had just received an Honourable Mention at the 2003 Philip Morris Art Awards, Singapore.