Sandra Lee

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About the artwork

"Row, Row, Row Your Boat" depicts a charming scene of three pandas enjoying a whimsical outing on a gently swirling sea. Two adult pandas, their black and white fur rendered with realistic detail, sit comfortably in a small, striped rowboat, each delicately holding a teacup. Their serene expressions suggest a shared moment of peaceful enjoyment. Between them, a platter of colourful macarons adds a touch of sweetness to their tea party. A smaller panda cub, equally adorable, floats playfully alongside the boat in a bright pink inflatable ring shaped like a donut. Its relaxed posture, with one leg dangling playfully in the water, adds a touch of childlike joy.

About the artist

Sandra Lee was born in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. From the moment she learnt to hold a pencil, she drew incessantly. Most of her time at school was spent looking out classroom windows and dreaming of faraway places, and filling the pages of her textbooks with drawings. She left her home country at age 18, and never looked back. Lee’s works are filled with exuberance and innocence and is partially inspired by her own quest for ‘home’. In her own words, ‘’Home is where you will never be a stranger, and never be alone. Having uprooted myself from my home country, I have spent the last 30 plus years travelling and moving from place to place. Home is where I put my rucksack down for a moment and connect with nature, people and culture, and make memories that influence my art.”   Lee became a Singaporean in 2016. She currently resides  between England and Spain, with frequent visit back to what she now considers her home country, Singapore. A natural storyteller, Lee’s art strikes a poignant balance of surreal childhood images and a vocal commentary of her ideas on current and past social realities, and life experiences.   Lee’s works makes use of iconic images from popular fairytales, nursery rhymes and fables, twisted by Lee’s fertile mind into vehicles for her own stories with her own protagonists, in layers that reflect her views of social and cultural issues. Each painting tells just enough of a story to pull the audiences in, but also leaves enough of a semantic gap for the creation of new stories.   Lee’s work isn’t about making grand statements, about challenging norms or rewriting aesthetic standards. Instead, each piece speaks quietly, telling us about the place the mundane and the fantastic meet, and giving us the opportunity to travel there for a little while.   Artist statement   “I believe in magic. My work explores the relationship between things that might or might not be, astonishing mysteries that are not solved for us. Somewhere in there, is the answer. The truth, perhaps, lie in place close to us, yet far away - our imagination.   It is not absolutely necessary that everyone perceives the same information or interprets my paintings in the same way. I hope my paintings and drawings will resonate beyond their immediate visual impact, and continue to reward the mind and eye long after the symbolic narrative is absorbed; and provide a vehicle for reflection and meditation, and for mediation between living and knowing.”