SYDNEY.- A major exhibition by leading Australian artist Lindy Lee is being presented at Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art Australia. Curated by the MCA Director Elizabeth Ann Macgregor OBE, the exhibition is the most comprehensive survey of the artist’s to date, spanning early works to more recent large-scale installations and sculptures.

The exhibition draws on three decades of Lindy Lee’s work showcasing painting, photography, sculpture, installation and public art in the MCA Level 3 Galleries. The show encompasses her early photocopy artworks and wax paintings that reflect on Western art history through to recent large-scale installations and sculptures inspired by Buddhist philosophies, as well as much-loved public artworks and commissions.

Exhibition highlights include a new installation, Moonlight Deity, commissioned especially for this MCA exhibition; a key early work reinstalled that signals the beginning of her interest in Buddhism, No Up, No Down, I Am Ten Thousand Things; a new titanium screen work; and an extended version of her flung bronze sculptural installations. A number of works are drawn from the MCA Collection, alongside significant loans from public and private collections, and early works from the artist’s own collection.

Elizabeth Ann Macgregor OBE first visited the artist’s studio in 1994, on her first trip to Australia and several years before she became Director of the MCA. The two have worked closely together collaborating on all stages of this project.




Macgregor said: ‘Lindy has had a long association with the MCA, with the first works entering the collection in 1995, through to a major presence in the opening exhibition of the expanded MCA, Marking Time, in 2012. A major survey bringing together all aspects of her work in Sydney is timely, she is an artist who weaves together her personal experience of living between two cultures to create highly evocative works which are especially relevant in today’s Australia.’

Lindy Lee added: ‘It is a great honour to have such a comprehensive survey of my work at the MCA, especially as Elizabeth Ann Macgregor is curating it. I am looking forward to creating new work but also in seeing how my ideas have evolved from the early questions of identity to the current investigations of being and cosmos.’

Born in Brisbane in 1954 to Chinese immigrants, Lindy Lee’s work has explored ideas around history, portraiture, identity, culture and nature. In the 1980s, she studied at the Chelsea School of Art, London and Sydney College of the Arts Australia, and in 2001, she received her PhD in Fine Art from the University of New South Wales.

For the last 20 years, Lindy Lee has turned her focus to the philosophies of Taoism and Ch’an (Zen) Buddhism, which explore the connections between humanity and nature, and are a key influence on the artist informing her work and her art-making process.

Lindy Lee has exhibited widely both in Australia and internationally with exhibitions in Canada, China, Hong Kong, Japan, Malaysia, New Zealand, Singapore and USA. In recent years, the artist’s practice has expanded into making important public artworks such as Life of Stars, Art Gallery of South Australia; The Garden of Cloud and Stone, Chinatown Sydney; and Life of Stars: Tenderness of Rain, Zheng Zhou Cultural Centre, China. In 2018, Lindy Lee was awarded a prestigious international commission to create an iconic gateway work for New York's Chinatown district.