The Life of Stars

For over thirty years Lindy Lee’s practice has grappled with identity and culture. Born in 1954 in Brisbane to Chinese immigrant parents, Lee came to attention in the 1980s with her postmodern works that appropriated and critiqued the European canons of portraiture. A pivotal shift in Lindy Lee’s practice coincided with her study of Zen Buddhism and the rediscovery of her Chinese heritage in the mid-1990s.

A mirrored beacon, The Life of Stars is the culmination of decades of experimentation, and represents a breakthrough in Lee’s artistic oeuvre. Six metres in height, this polished stainless steel oval form is dotted with a constellation of over 80,000 circular holes. Each dot was hand-placed by the artist at Urban Art Projects foundry in Shanghai during a meditative three-week process.

The pattern of concentric circles makes reference to Indra’s net – a metaphor attributed to the ancient Buddhist Tu-Shun (557–640 BCE), who envisioned a vast net with a jewel at each juncture, which itself reflects all of the other jewels in a radiant cosmic matrix. In Lee’s hands the sculpture becomes a metaphor for the interconnection between humanity and nature. A twenty-four-hour work of art, The Life of Stars reflects its surrounding community by day and is luminous by night, projecting a web of light. 

Leigh Robb, Curator Contemporary Art