Gallery Benefit

‘Gallery Benefit’, National Gallery Singapore
2023
Gallery Benefit

This striking pair of prints captures the porcelain Bibiana Lee created for her 2019 I AM CHINA project in which she explored the devastating discrimination inflicted against Chinese Indonesians. The fragmented plate is a porcelain piece titled Pieces of May 1998 which brings to light the catastrophic event of targeted violence against the Chinese community in Indonesia. The other print depicts a plate titled A Nation Divided which investigates the schism often created in a country during times of political election. This seems especially relevant to the political landscape of today in which identity politics and social media are often utilized to intensify divisions through the spreading of lies and hate. An extremely powerful set of works, Bibiana Lee uses these beautiful porcelain designs in peranakan colours to interrogate the painful historical experience of the Indonesian Chinese.