Rozana Lee: Above The Sofa

As part of Above The Sofa at Artspace Aotearoa, artist Rozana Lee shows To Begin Again.

The central concern of my practice is how to create a contemplative space where cultural dynamism can be felt as togetherness or belonging, without being grounded in homogeneity. I want to explore distinctive cultural spaces and the life of particular communities that allow for something shared, both within and beyond existing national and geographic boundaries.

To Begin Again 1&2 are part of a series of work that references batik as signifier for Indonesian cultural identity. Using a Tjanting, the traditional instrument for applying hot wax, I draw patterns that never return to the same form – each repetition contains small differences and displacements. By leaving most of the wax on the fabrics, rather than boiling it all off, I am deliberately fabricating a language of non-integration, and incompleteness. This incompleteness and ambiguity in the process points to a temporality of the ‘in-between’. This in-between condition allows “newness to come into the world.”

Rozana Lee recently completed her Master of Fine Arts at Elam School of Fine Arts. She is a recipient of The University of Auckland Research Masters Scholarship 2018 and Summer Research Scholarship 2017/2018. Lee won the People Choice Award (joint winner) of Estuary Art and Ecology Prize 2018 and joint second prize of Henrietta and Lola Anne Tunbridge Water Colour Scholarship Award 2018. She is a finalist in a number of New Zealand art awards; Wallace Art Awards, Parkin Drawing Prize, Molly Morpeth Canaday Award: Painting & Drawing, and Walker & Hall Waiheke Art Award. Lee was the artist in residence at Instinc Gallery, Singapore in March 2016.