Projects
PROJECTS
PAZIFIK - LEIPZIG ARTIST RESIDENCY
Supported by Goethe Institut Manila and Leipzig International Artist Programme
1 November 2022 – 29 January 2023
Leipzig, Germany
Unbound is a large-scale piece by Lee Paje that reflects her perspective on gender and the diverse narratives surrounding it, particularly the ones that were inherited from her country’s colonial history.
In her three month residency at LIA, Paje creates an explorative work that incorporates painting, printmaking, and sculpture. Through the use of historical archival text repeatedly printed on a Leporello book, she paints over, cuts and transforms it into a three-dimensional installation. In altering the form of a book, she creates forms and possible realities not bound by the text and its pages.
”Unbound”
Serigraph, acrylic, and cutout on watercolour paper
49 x 980 cm
2023
FATHOM: THE MONUMENTAL IN ART SERIES
For the benefit of VIVA EXCON 2020
25 October 2019 – 20 January 2020
Orange Project, Bacolod City, Negros Occidental
In excavating memories of hospital stays and visits as a sickly child fed on Bible stories and enthralled by a mural of Malakas and Maganda in the Philippine creation myth, the artist liberally retells the narrative from her own lens. She mixes with local legend the tropes of the creation myth in Judeo-Christian tradition. Instead of the Tree of Knowledge, a body of water is a central image. It takes the form of a lake, but also of the bodies of the first human beings. There is no first man or first woman; only first people. In the artist’s vision of Eden, identity is fluid and gender is like clothing - an outer covering that one can wear or discard. In this paradise, there are no binaries.
Words by Leo Abaya
Organised by Orange Project and Tin-aw Art Management Inc. for Visayan Islands Visual Arts Exhibit Conference (VIVA EXCON).
”The stories that weren’t told”
Oil on copper
243.84 x 300 cm, triptych
2019
A KNOWING INTIMACY OR A LIFE
7 December 2019 – 7 March 2020
Jorge B. Vargas Museum, University of the Philippines - Diliman
The pieces are afterlives of the installative sculptures, Pagpamulak, meaning to blossom, first situated at the University of the Philippines Sculpture Garden for the public art project, Lawas (The Body). Gathered in the wide expanse of the garden, the off-white concrete intimate body parts echoed an outdoor playground. Viewers were invited to engage with the pieces arranged across the field by climbing a belly, resting on a penis, sitting atop breasts and to see-saw on a vagina. Stylised sex organs served as recreational ground and, equally as a fleshing out a breaking down of the assumptions with regard to these body parts. How to associate with and approach sex? Intimations of the very parts that are assigned to every person become reconsiderations of the expectations, prejudices, and duties attached to them - an exploration of senses and affects how people assess their belonging to the world. How to identify oneself? In their unrestored state, the works display the effects of extreme external elements. In the context of this exhibition, the deconstructed intimate body is plain, gargantuan, imperfect in form and serves as meditation of intimacies of social constructs and convention. Viewers are once again invited to engage with the unrefined and unprepared parts of intimacies.
”Pagpamulak”
Concrete, Installation
Dimensions Variable
2017
OPEN STUDIOS AT ART OMI
8 July 2018
Ghent, New York
Paje creates works concerned with independence, individuality, and identities forming visual narratives in alternative realities. For the residency, she bends a 20-foot Copper painting, one medium she has used in her practice along with sculpture and video, that explores and reinvents ideas on space, body, and identity. The installation merges scenes from the tropics where she resides, and the temperate, where the residency is occurring. Oriented in a loop, it is symbolic of an imagined and perceived space without beginning and without end, neither here nor there, endless and eternal.
”Of this Time”
Oil on Copper paintings, Installation
Dimensions Variable
2018
LAWAS
April - August 2018
Sculpture Garden, University of the Philippines - Diliman
Quezon City, Philippines
LAWAS comprises three public art projects for the 2018 UP Diliman Festival of Culture and the Arts. Pleiades, Pusod and Pagpamulak explore the intricate process of dwelling the body. All three are located at visible and accessible areas inside the sprawling Diliman campus.
The intimate registers of the senses, faith and the sacred feminine, and play through vision are expressed in art pieces by Agnes Arellano, Mark Justiniani, and Lee Paje. They probe the limits of the body, often imagined a vessel or a contained space. How can art whether installation, sculpture, or site specific forms become extensions of the human body through experience? Art that incorporates multi-dimensionality in its engagement of body and space becomes a technological cipher by which the human form is reworked and imagined, beyond containment and towards amplification.
Pagpamulak means ‘to blossom’. The work gathers white painted concrete body parts at the edge of the Sculpture Garden. The pieces make a playground, where we can climb a belly, see saw on a pussy, and rest on a penis. These pieces take from artist Lee Paje’s 2011 project where vagina shaped chocolates filled with tapuy or rice wine were offered to audiences during an exhibition opening. Viewers are invited to not only sit and lie on but also play with the stylised sculptures that mimic the body’s intimate parts.
Words by Tessa Maria Guazon on wordsmithwoman website
Curated by Tessa Maria Guazon and Cecilia De la Paz
