Rissim Contemporary is pleased to present Lee Mok Yee’s The Pyramid Series, 2021–2023, a solo exhibition by the artist and our second collaboration with The Back Room. The exhibition presents a new body of work by the mid-career Lee comprising 15 sculptural wall-mounted and free-standing works made with wooden pyramid pieces and mirrored stainless steel. The exhibition offers an interesting dialogue with its predecessor, Saiful Razman’s Pangsa, as both Saiful and Lee are material-focused artists who enjoy exploring the limits of their chosen materials.
Hailing from a family involved in the business of wholesaling, Lee has a familiarity with the patterns of consumer desire thanks to having grown up surrounded by mass-produced wholesale goods since childhood. The present series of works utilises wooden pyramids in varying sizes, normally used as ornamental touches on household furniture and fixtures (toppers on staircase banisters, or patterns on a wardrobe), and mirrored stainless steel cut into small triangles. The pyramids are arranged into random shapes resembling Tetris pieces or pixellated shapes, with the mirrors affixed to different faces of the pyramids. The works, mounted on the walls like paintings yet jutting out and fabricated like sculptures, offer multiple angles for appreciation, with angled viewing offering a different effect from a frontal view. They also have a somewhat interactive or changeable element, by their ability to reflect light and the viewer’s face, fragmenting the whole into shards and bouncing off light in different ways. All of the frames have been hand-built in accordance to each work’s shape.
Created intermittently over a span of 2 years, the works of The Pyramid Series are a practice of repetitive and time-consuming labour. The artist’s growing familiarity with his material is charted through his experimentation with different techniques over time, techniques like combining multiple sizes of wood in a single work, or playing with different colours of wood and mirrors, or sawing off the edges of the work to create a rounded form (thus breaking the “rules” of the arrangements by interfering with the pyramids’ original shape). The variety of works within the show gives us a sense of an artist who’s constantly appraising the properties of his material anew.
The Pyramid Series expands a few other existing tendencies in Lee’s practice. Arrangements of similar (often mass-produced) items is a recurrent feature of his practice, with past examples including his works with incense in 2019 and his works with wood cork in 2021. He has also worked with reflective surfaces as early as his student days in the UK, when he created an outdoor installation using aluminium light reflectors—a work that he reprised with larger mirrors for a piece as part of his online residency, Reciprocal Space, in 2021. The element of distortion recurs throughout his practice, not merely in his distortion of materials through subverting their original functionality, but also in the distorted self-image, as evidenced here through the use of mirrors. Previous works that explore identity and self-perception were his cut-up tarpaulin self-portrait and portrait etchings into silverware, both created during his residency at Rimbun Dahan in 2022.
About the Artist
Lee Mok Yee is a Malaysian artist born in the port town of Klang, but currently based in Kuala Lumpur. He graduated from the Dasein Academy of Art, KL, and later from the Fine Art programme at the Middlesex University of London. His work is primarily concerned with the entanglement between the conceptual and the material.
His work is process-oriented and often interrogates the material aspect in art-making. He often chooses to work with readymade or store-bought objects, rearranging these materials as an act of interrogation against uniformity, pushing against the boundaries of function in mass-production. In the re/arranging, he questions the idea of moving within structures as an exploration of change and its futilities.
Lee’s work has been exhibited locally and internationally, in Germany, London, Singapore, and South Korea. Notable exhibitions include Rudiments (duo with Mark Tan) at Temu House, Kuala Lumpur, in 2022, A Rhetorical Garden (solo) at Richard Koh Fine Art, Kuala Lumpur, in 2021, Superstition II (solo) at George Town Festival, Penang, in 2019, and This is Where We Meet (duo with Liew Kwai Fei) at OUR ArtProjects, Kuala Lumpur, in 2017. He was also awarded the Gold prize of the UOB Painting of the Year award in 2021. A large part of Lee’s practice focuses on collaborative projects and exchange through art residencies. He recently completed a residency in Arles, France, in 2022, under the auspices of Alliance française in Malaysia. In 2021, he was a grantee of the British Council Connections through Culture grant, which allowed him to have an online residency with British artist, Laura Porter. In the same year, he initiated a temporary collective called “Labour and Weight” with local art and cultural workers Okui Lala, Yeo Lyle, and Koe Cheng Gaik. The project was funded by CENDANA’s Art in the City Public Art Commissioning Project and later exhibited at Multimedia University in Cyberjaya in 2023.