How an ugly sculpture by Eva Hesse changed art student Leelee Chans journey from painter to
During her short career, German-American artist Eva Hesse became known for a body of work that challenged the conventions of sculpture, experimenting with unconventional materials and constantly questioning the nature of art and artistic production.
Hang Up (1966), one of her best-known works, consisting of a wooden frame wrapped in a bedsheet with a loop of metal tube protruding from it, marked her transition from painting to sculpture. Hong Kong contemporary sculptor Leelee Chan tells Richard Lord how it changed her life.
Like Eva Hesse, I started off as a painter: we’re really similar. This was the first Eva Hesse piece I encountered, when I was an undergraduate student in the painting department of the Art Institute of Chicago, in 2004.
I always walked through the museum to get to my classes. There was a small section of contemporary art, and I remember seeing her work for the first time; I had seen her name in an art history book before, but nothing else. At that time I only knew people like Van Gogh and Dali – I didn’t even known Jackson Pollock – so my understanding of the work was minimal.
It’s made from a bedsheet, with a steel tube extending from it; the steel is industrial, but with a bedsheet, which is personal. The frame we use to stretch canvases is used as a hanging device. It’s like a painting but it’s not a painting. It asks: what is a sculpture and what is a painting?
For me, seeing this work in a museum was shocking. I didn’t like it, I didn’t understand it and I didn’t know how to look at it. I wondered why they would have something so ugly in a museum. But it also made me want to find out more. I realised that art can be subversive – it was a quality I had never been exposed to.
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The change in me wasn’t immediate. I was a student in the painting department, and I was obsessed with painting. I only started to think about it when I was a graduate student at the Rhode Island School of Design, and was studying sculpture.
The way she used materials was very eccentric and also really experimental; it challenges our perception.
She worked with materials like latex, resin and fibreglass. I remember reading an interview with her, and she said that when she worked with a fibreglass fabricator, she found it was too cold and impersonal, so instead of making these perfect fibreglass products, she embraced mistakes and imperfections, like bubbles in the fibreglass that create a translucent effect.
I was experimenting with all kinds of materials and finding my own language. During that process, I saw her journey and thought about her a lot. Some pieces I thought were ugly at the time, but I embraced that. Then as now, my goal was not to create perfect objects to contemplate; I’m more interested in the process, the journey of discovery for myself and the audience.
She was super remarkable during her time, the 1960s, which was dominated by males and minimalism. She’s like an outcast. You can’t quite pin her down – she developed her own language that fully belonged to herself. Her work is mysterious, not easy to identify. That is really inspiring; that as an artist, this is something you can do. It gave me courage: you can be like that, too.
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