Chan Li Shan - Searching for Lee Wen: A Life in 135 Parts

Flickering with exacting yet poignant insights while balancing anecdote, lyricism, curated imagery, laudatory response and verbatim record, this biography delicately deconstructs linearity without compromising on a heartfelt and multifaceted picture of a performance art icon.

Cyril Wong, Poet and Fictionist

I congratulate Chan Li Shan for having written this beautiful biography of Lee Wen, who died too soon from Parkinsons disease. At the age of 30, Lee Wen gave up a secure and stable career in a bank to study art. He would devote the rest of his life to the practice of art in its many forms: drawing, painting, poetry, songs, installation and performance. George Bernard Shaw once said that the world consists of two kinds of people: reasonable people and unreasonable people. The reasonable people are those who conform to the world. The unreasonable people are those who seek to change the world. Lee Wen was an unreasonable man and artist. Lee Wen once described himself as a soldier of culture. He fought many battles for culture and art. His victories were not unnoticed. He was awarded the Cultural Medallion in 2005. We will never forget him as the Yellow Man and The Sun Boy.

Professor Tommy Koh, Founding Chairman

National Arts Council

We like to pretend that biographies are objective. That the truth they bear is untainted by bias or partiality or opinion. That they are pristine. Nothing is further from the truth. Biographies are fiercely subjective and born of one persons obsession with someone elses life. The obsessiveness is not only for the storyline or narrative, but the telling of it. And the telling of the life story of an artist like Lee Wensignificant, protean, impulsive, explosive, brutally honestdemands an obsessive storyteller. Li Shan dives headlong into the minutiae of Lee Wens life, disregarding guardrails of convention and is sometimes eccentrically selective. She is desperately seeking line and colour, and motif and sfumato; yearning for composition that is him. The result is bricolage, cracked, disrupted, dismembered. But beyond the veil of the tale, as the clouds of dissonance disperse, something of a shape emerges; distinct and hewn by instinct, intimacy and understanding. A Lee Wen shape.

T. Sasitharan, Director

Intercultural Theatre Institute

In Searching for Lee Wen, Chan Li Shan offers readers a biography of a fascinating and important performance artist; a memoir of her own experience as his biographer, collaborator, and friend; and an innovative, nuanced, often moving mosaic of interview excerpts, testimonials from friends and admirers, timelines linking Singapores history to Lee Wens own, striking photographs, and meditations on the act of representing a life. The result is a memorable book, in which both Lee Wen and Chan Li Shan are interfused, liminally, between being a sign, a signal and a person, enigmatically within, yet beyond eachtruly an elusive joy to watch.

Craig Howes, Director, Center for Biographical Research Professor of English

University of Hawaii at Mnoa

Copyright 2022 by Chan Li Shan

Cover design by Priscilla Wong

Cover illustration by Yamaguchi Yohei

Published in Singapore by Epigram Books

www.epigram.sg

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying or otherwise without the prior written permission of the publisher.

National Library Board, Singapore

Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

First edition, May 2022.

For my parents,

for KC

and Ced Chew.

To be fearless, to imagine, to live.

A Note on Form

IN THIS BOOK, you will find eight chapters or section headings that use actual titles from Lee Wens body of songs. The books structure is fragmentedit is a life in many parts. Each part is essential in its adding to the whole, and the whole is itself a window unto a world. Through this, I hope you will get a glimpse of the world of the artist Lee Wen. This book does not aim to be comprehensive but rather to outline the general contours of the landscape of his life. While this book is loosely chronological and can be read from beginning to end, you are invited to start and stop at any point, dipping in and out as you wish.

JUST GO AWAY AND DO YOUR THING

ITS NOT A DREAM

ITS A REALITY

ONE BY ONE

TAKE IT STRAIGHT FROM YOUR HEART

DONT WORRY IF ITS RIGHT OR WRONG

AS LONG AS YOU KNOW

YOU FEEL IT STRONG

HEY NOW

BELIEVE IN YOURSELF

BE COOL ABOUT IT

ONE STEP AT A TIME

ONE DAY AT A DAY

DONT GO AWAY

Kena Scolded

IN SEPTEMBER 2017, six months into my serious writing phase of Lee Wens life, I foolishly showed him parts of what I had written.

Lee Wen managed to read the first ten pages. It was difficult for him to flip the pages. Bent over in his chair, his Parkinsons seemed to be getting worse.

He smiled widely; his mischievous eyes were lit.

Its good! he declared. I am very happy with it.

I was relieved. I was worried he would hate it, that my efforts had been inadequate. I went home. I had a restful night for the first time in months.

On waking up the next morning, I looked at my phone through blurry eyes. I saw the following message from Lee Wen: Hi, I started to read your text more seriously and found errors and misunderstanding on every other paragraph.

That jolted me like an electric shock going through my body. I immediately touched my phone screen to read the rest of his message:

I believe you wrote from memory and although the 90 per cent memory is alright the errors unfortunately veered the truth away at crucial tangents that may seem unimportant details to you and your readers but ouch it pains me to find them taken as facts. What in fact errors of carelessness nearing insensitive variables though unintentional I find it damaging to the real me Im trying to be.

Shaken to the bone, I wrote back: Dear Lee Wen, if I have gravely misrepresented your life, please forgive me. It is in the nature of biography that one is constantly chasing and trying to grasp an elusive character.

His reply flashed across my screen:

• Hence if it is fiction then lets do fiction. But it seems you are doing a biographical narrative based on facts stop then what I recommend would be more thorough check on your note taking and comparing two dues in the news media such as such as the drowning of teacher Captain Tan it was in the newspapers