Lee Wen's conversations with a blank canvas

WHILE some artists create art for art's sake, others seek to improve the collective human experience through it. Lee Wen certainly belongs to the latter. A peaceful warrior, citizen artist and facilitator, he declares himself "a serviceman in terms of art". Art is used to air alternative views on identity and culture in his second solo exhibition, Lee Wen: Songs Unsung, a retrospective of 65 selected works between the years of 1990 and 2015.

Early childhood memories influenced Lee Wen's artistic practice, he says, recounting how a book of colourful children's drawings from many countries triggered his desire to create similar images.

His teachers used his work as shining examples in art class, which encouraged him further. "My father was a writer. I was three or four years old when he passed away."