Bong Chai Lee
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Chai Lee is a Singapore-based visual artist whose practice is guided by observation, memory, and material sensitivity. Working with installation and tactile processes, she explores how personal histories are carried through objects, gestures, and everyday spaces. Her works often reflect on family relationships, womanhood, and inherited expectations, translating lived experiences into quiet visual narratives. Through the use of textile, ceramic, and found materials, she creates environments that invite slow looking and contemplation. Interested in what is felt but seldom spoken, she seeks to give presence to subtle emotions and invisible labour, opening spaces for reflection and gentle dialogue.My practice spans painting, installation, and material-based processes, working with clay, ceramics, textiles and found objects. I am drawn to materials that carry traces of touch, time, and everyday life. Through them, I construct visual narratives that reflect on memory, domestic spaces and intergenerational inheritance. Personal histories and familial experiences surface gently within form and texture, suggesting what is remembered, felt, or left unsaid. Guided by storytelling, I create spaces that invite slow looking and contemplation, opening quiet moments for reflection, empathy, and shared understanding.
Title: 青花牡丹梦 (Blue Peony Dreams)
Year: 2026
Medium: Textile, ceramics
Statement:
青花牡丹梦 (Blue Peony Dreams) is an installation and sculptural work that narrates my mother’s story as a young woman in the 1950s. Inspired by the visual language of blue-and-white porcelain, the work evokes ideals of refinement, domestic virtue, and culturally prescribed femininity. Like many girls of her generation, she grew up believing that marriage into a good family would lead to happiness and stability. Instead, she entered a large farming household where devotion as a wife, mother, and daughter-in-law defined her existence. Through fragile materials and delicate forms, the work reflects the quiet endurance of women whose dreams bloomed silently beneath the weight of duty.