Mar­sha Pearce

Mar­sha Pearcere­views Reah Lee Sing's showIn This Room

In a world where peo­ple of­ten judge a book by its cov­er, where a num­ber of so­ci­eties are char­ac­terised by racial pro­fil­ing, eth­nic ha­tred and xeno­pho­bia, Reah Lee Sing's ex­hi­bi­tion of oil paint­ings asks view­ers to delve in­to the chap­ters of the lives of every­day men, woman and chil­dren.Her show en­ti­tled In This Room, which re­cent­ly opened at Medul­la Art Gallery, is her first pub­lic dis­play of her work. Rough­ly three years ago, Lee Sing, who is the wife of for­mer may­or of Port-of-Spain Louis Lee Sing, left her 20-year ad­ver­tis­ing ca­reer to paint full-time.She en­ters the field of paint­ing with lit­tle for­mal train­ing. She stud­ied art at St Joseph's Con­vent, San Fer­nan­do, and Pleas­antville Se­nior Com­pre­hen­sive. She al­so com­plet­ed one year of a vi­su­al arts bach­e­lor's de­gree at the UWI St Au­gus­tine cam­pus.

Lee Sing's pieces de­pict im­ages of peo­ple she has seen on her trav­els around the globe: Spain, New Or­leans, St Lu­cia, Chi­na, Is­rael, Uruguay and Pe­ru. A vis­it to her ex­hi­bi­tion of­fers an op­por­tu­ni­ty to en­gage in peo­ple watch­ing–the act of ob­serv­ing and guess­ing a per­son's sto­ry.Al­though Lee Sing pro­vides a price list with use­ful para­graphs that give de­tails about her en­coun­ters with and mus­ings about the sub­jects of her paint­ings, a view­er may find greater plea­sure in look­ing at the works and imag­in­ing for her­self the nar­ra­tives, the hopes, the tri­als and na­ture of the paint­ed in­di­vid­u­als.

Who is the seat­ed man in the paint­ing Read­ing about Sub­marines? Is he a fa­ther, a broth­er, an un­cle? Is he a bib­lio­phile?In some pieces, the sub­ject is "un­aware" of the view­er in the gallery but in oth­ers, the view­er's and sub­ject's eyes meet. For ex­am­ple, in the paint­ing Sell­ing Fish on the Road­side, a lit­tle boy braces his mer­chan­dise with his hands and shoul­der. His plead­ing eyes lock with those of the view­er. This is more than a po­ten­tial mo­ment for the buy­ing and sell­ing of fish. It is a trade of looks. Both sub­ject and view­er be­come a prod­uct or com­mod­i­ty of each oth­er's gaze.In the piece Hon­ey Skin, a woman with a scowl on her face chal­lenges the view­er's cu­ri­ous stare. Her ex­pres­sion makes it pos­si­ble to an­tic­i­pate her thoughts.

She seems to ask, us­ing T&T par­lance: What is your sto­ry?

It is ques­tion that can be trans­lat­ed as: What is wrong with you? Why are you look­ing at me? Yet, in an­oth­er sense, it is a ques­tion that dares the view­er to dis­close the de­tails of his or her life.In the paint­ing Mu­sic in His Hand, a young man lis­tens to mu­sic via his mo­bile phone. View­ers in the gallery watch him but the boy al­so stud­ies each view­er, seem­ing­ly set­ting him or her to his own sound­track so that every vis­i­tor in the ex­hi­bi­tion space un­folds like a cin­e­mat­ic script, each per­son a com­bi­na­tion of mov­ing im­age and sound, each per­son a walk­ing sto­ry­line.

Lee Sing's ren­der­ing of large­ly emp­ty back­grounds in her paint­ings height­ens the view­er's ca­pac­i­ty to con­cen­trate on her pre­sen­ta­tions of var­i­ous faces and ex­pres­sions. She tunes out the par­tic­u­lars of the sur­round­ings of her sub­jects and fo­cus­es on shar­ing not on­ly phys­i­cal fea­tures but al­so the spir­it of the peo­ple. It is a strat­e­gy that en­cour­ages the view­er to think about the "back­ground" that is not read­i­ly seen, in oth­er words, the cir­cum­stances and his­to­ry of each sub­ject.

In a num­ber of pieces she shows tech­ni­cal com­pe­tence but paint­ings such as Pe­ru­vian Wealth, which gives a close-up of a woman, demon­strate that Lee Sing's prac­tice has room for growth with more at­ten­tion need­ed in her de­scrip­tion of mus­cu­la­ture and the skele­tal frame.There are vi­su­al in­stances in this ex­hi­bi­tion that stir au­di­ences to think about them­selves but view­ers can eas­i­ly get lost in thoughts about oth­ers. The ex­pe­ri­ence in­vites a deep­er prob­ing and un­der­stand­ing of not on­ly the peo­ple in the room of the gallery but al­so those in the wider, shared room of the world we in­hab­it.