AUSTIN LEE (B. 1983)

Rendered in playful matte tones with soft edges, Austin Lee’s Burn seems to have been born from the Internet’s graffiti. Set against a sunset ground, a figure in profile fills the expanse of the canvas, which stretches over two metres wide. Aura-like shadows pulse around his face. Lee, who works between painting and sculpture, received his MFA from the Yale School of Art. His solo exhibition Human Nature opens in February at the M Woods Museum in Beijing. Inspired by the tools of his era, Lee relies upon both analogue and digital processes as a means of summoning the early Internet. To create his paintings, he begins by laying out his designs using a virtual reality modelling software. Once satisfied, he recreates these compositions in paint and using an airbrush. Although Lee’s canvases are populated with chimeras and magical beasts, he views them less as individual figures than emotions. As he has explained, ‘I think of them as representations of feelings. Somethings they are influenced by real people, sometimes not’ (A. Lee, quoted in A. Angelos, ‘Exploring physical and digital binaries with Austin Lee’s exuberantly animated paintings’, It’s Nice That, 14 July 2017). Burn summons a warm joy, the first evening of summer, a flush of pure, unadulterated happiness.