- City
- Toronto
- Booth
- Nathan Phillips Square
Booth 131
Donald Lee
Donald Lee approaches the Chinese character not as a linguistic tool, but as an architecture for creating abstract art. His work is a continuum on a two-thousand-year evolutionary journey—from the early inscriptions on oracle bones at 1600 BC to the refined maturity of the "Regular Script" during Tang Dynasty at 900 AD. Although Chinese writing has remained largely unchanged for a millennium, Donald is inspired by the work of the ancient creators who invented the various writing scripts and the more than hundred thousand Chinese characters.
Donald posits that the ability to synthesize lines into complex abstract forms is an innate human faculty. His practice serves as both a question and a challenge: if this creative impulse is hardwired into our biology, why did we stop evolving our visual language? By contemplating the evolution of ancient "abstract constructs," Donald invites us to reawaken our dormant ability to create new, non-representational forms for the modern era.
