Lee Graves Projects

I have been very fortunate. I was born in Taiwan in the bustling capital city of Taipei where I grew up in a culturally and linguistically diverse environment. There I was exposed from an early age to people from every region of China and from every walk of life.

I was also very fortunate that early on I was exposed to many different international students because my mother taught at the national university. And although we lived in Taiwan, my father worked in Southeast Asia, always bringing home new foreign ideas and stories of lives different from our own.

I was very fortunate. I grew up in an environment that straddled the sharp urban-rural divide that characterized the margins of the capital city in those days. On one side of my street was the national university campus, planned and developed, smoothly paved and carefully manicured. On the other side of my street were broad, sprawling rice fields that flowed easily to the nearby foothills and beyond.

I am very fortunate that I had the opportunity to study the visual arts from a very early age. From the age of six, I studied watercolors with the renowned Prof. Ma Pa Hsui. Then in middle school I studied with Master Yu Chong Lin, famous for his work in the school of “flower and bird” painting. At the same time, I studied traditional “landscape” painting with Master Sun Yun Hseng, a well-known artist in the Chinese Northern Landscape School.

After my family immigrated to the United States, I had the opportunity to study visual arts in the western tradition. My best introduction was as a student of Professor Leonard Maurer's at Montgomery College, then later in my studies with the faculty at the School of Fine Arts at Indiana University.  Still, I continued to return to Taiwan to explore different schools and styles of Chinese painting.

After moving to Rhode Island, I began working as a product designer in the commercial gift industry. My years of experience working in all areas of the commercial gift industry have had a distinct influence on my view of painting and visual arts. To paraphrase the contemporary American painter Professor James McGarrell, I think of myself as a “maker,” rather than as an “expresser.” “Artistic expression” is but one part of the “making.” The other part of the "making," as I learned from Professor Bonnie Sklarski at Indiana, is its contribution to our search for knowledge of history and humanity.

As a “maker,” I am critically conscious of the changeable and unpredictable nature of the process of production. I construct my paintings from close observation of nature and the man-made world, personal anecdotes, memories, and daydreams. All of these things are reworked, reorganized and synthesized in the process of constructing my paintings into a new-made reality.

This new-made reality in my work represents the intersection of "borderlessness" in Contemporary Art and "inclusiveness," which for me constitutes a very concrete moral position. Beyond philosophical and formal characterizations of "contemporary art," this quality of "borderlessness/inclusiveness" both in my work and in my life means striving to overcome prejudices in a productively rational manner.