CHUN-YI LEE 君毅李 (b. 1965 Kaoshiung, Taiwan) moved to Hong Kong as a child in 1970 and graduated from the Chinese University of Hong Kong where he was mentored by his teacher Liu Kuo-Sung. He has an MFA from the graduate program of Fine Arts at Tunghai University in Taiwan.
Lee has a very distinct and revolutionary style that sets him apart because he does not use a brush in the traditional sense. Instead, he employs calligraphy by carving Chinese characters or symbols onto wood, thus creating his own chops which are used all throughout his paintings, forming dramatic photographic end results that are visual compositions from landscapes to portraits. In 2016, a Mao triptych sold for over USD 72,000 at Christie’s Hong Kong.
Lee’s work is in the permanent collections of the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford, the Arthur M. Sackler Museum at Harvard, the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco and the Phoenix Museum of Art in the United States, the Hong Kong Museum of Art, the Jiangsu and Qingdao Art Museums in the People’s Republic of China and more around the world.
