Ed Bing Lee

Ed Bing Lee’s intricate, knotted sculptures are elegant, humorous, and festive. Gross McCleaf is pleased to exhibit a grouping of work from several series created over the course of the last 17 years.

Some from the “Delectable Series” playfully depict food, while works from the “Chawan” series appear as functional objects, bowls, and cups - chawan literally meaning “tea bowl” in Chinese. While Lee constructs each object in detail, the work immediately presents as soft, threaded sculpture rather than trompe l'oeil or facsimile. Challenging our expectations about the world, the artist plays with textures in ways that are reminiscent of Claes Oldenburg’s “soft sculptures”.

Drawn by the immediacy of the process and the satisfaction of an art form that is reliant on meticulous handwork, Lee has perfected his painstaking knotting practice over a career spanning more than 40 years. The artist constructs each sculpture out of thousands of tiny knots from various kinds of thread, ribbon, and lacing. To create shapes, Lee alters the tension of the thread, changes the style of knot, or selects a different material. Lee likens the additive nature of his process to the painting style of pointillism, most known through the works of George Seurat who created painted forms through the repetition of small, dot-like brushstrokes.