Nicholas Tee
Saturday 15 October
Rich Mix
Tickets
As a kid, I hated being Chinese and Singaporean.
Instead, I wanted to be White and live in a Western society.
In this work, I use my childhood desire to rub my skin colour away as a starting point to unearth the roots of my identity.
In homage to Lee Wen’s Journey of a Yellow Man, I paint myself completely yellow. However, while his use of yellow “[parodied] by exaggeration the orientalists symbol of ethnicity” and “[elevated] the symbolism of yellow to that of the colour of the sun or that of gold”, my “yellow-ness” comes from a source of shame -something I wanted to get rid of.