INFO
| Name | Rozana Lee (she/her) |
| Also known as | Rozana Karimun |
| Born | 1970 |
| Country of Birth | Indonesia |
| Place of Residence | Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland |
| Ethnicities | Chinese-Indonesian |
| Artform | Visual arts |
| Decades Active | 2010s, 2020s |
ABOUT
Rozana Lee is a multidisciplinary artist whose work explores themes of migration, cross-cultural mobility, generational memories and survival through violent geopolitical upheaval and adversity. Lee is best known for her textile work exploring how global histories and cultural identities are woven into fabrics.
Born and raised in Banda Aceh, Indonesia, Lee lived with her parents above their textile shophouse. Her mother was trained as a seamstress and textiles formed her earliest memories. In her work, Lee often employs the visual language of Indonesian batik and draws a range of symbolic or cultural imagery using hot beeswax applied using a tjanting — a traditional pen-like tool with a small copper cup and tiny spout — to question notions of originality, belonging and home through the frame of migrant experience.
As a fourth-generation Chinese person living in Indonesia, Lee had a childhood marked by anti-Chinese legislation following the mass killings of ethnic Chinese across Indonesia in 1965–66, associated with anti-communist purges. In a renewed wave of anti-Chinese violence in 1998, she fled to Singapore before settling in Aotearoa in 2010. The 2004 Boxing Day Tsunami took Lee’s mother’s life and destroyed her family’s shophouse and home. These events made her reevaluate her life, and in 2009 she gave up a 15-year banking career and turned to art to help her make sense of the world.
Lee holds a Bachelor of Visual Arts from Auckland University of Technology and a Master of Fine Arts from Elam School of Fine Arts, University of Auckland, which she graduated with in 2018. She has undertaken artist residencies at INSTINC, Singapore (2016), Making Space, Guangzhou, China (2019), and took part in the Zhelezka research project and mobile residency, travelling along the Silk Road in Central Asia, in 2023.
Her work, in particular, Sekali pendatang, tetap pendatang (Once an immigrant, always an immigrant) (2023) weaves collective memories and histories through visual and material languages, including batik textiles, rubbings, videos and archival material. Combining video and material connected to these events, which shaped her and many Chinese Indonesians’ lives, she says “this project reflects on family history, the translation and adaptation of traditions, trade, colonisation, state violence and the construction of national identity. It asks us to consider what stories are being silenced, and what stories we do not have the voice to tell.”
LINKS
Key works / presentations
2024 — Memory Lines, City Gallery Wellington, Pōneke
2024 — Windows to the world, Homestead Galleries, Corban Estate Arts Centre, Tāmaki Makaurau, as part of Auckland Arts Festival
2023 — Sekali pendatang, tetap pendatang, Te Uru Waitākere Contemporary Gallery, Tāmaki Makaurau
2023 — The Zhelezka Project: On the Tracks through Central Asia
2022 — A Way of Being Free, Northart Gallery, Tāmaki Makaurau
2021/22 — Birds from Another Continent, World of Cultures Festival, Tāmaki Makaurau
2022 — Several Degrees of Attention, Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, Ngāmotu
2021 — Crossings (a group show about intimacies and distances), Adam Art Gallery Te Pātaka Toi, Pōneke
2020 — Home is Anywhere in the World, Meanwhile Gallery, Pōneke
2020 — New Work, Melanie Roger Gallery, Tāmaki Makaurau
2020 — Project 2020, Auckland Art Fair 2020, online
2020 — Future Flowering, Play_Station, Pōneke
2019 — Two Oceans At Once, ST PAUL St Gallery, Tāmaki Makaurau
2019 — Reconfigure(d), Making Space, Guangzhou
2018 — To Begin Again, Elam School of Fine Arts, Tāmaki Makaurau
2017 — Ornamental Patterns: Reclaiming Excess and Difference, Elam School of Fine Arts, Tāmaki Makaurau
2017 — Ornament and Abstraction, Sanderson Contemporary Gallery, Tāmaki Makaurau
2016 — Singapore Sensation, Instinc, Singapore
2014–15 — On the Manner of Addressing Chaos, AUT, Tāmaki Makaurau
2013 — Tsunami Hour, Studio One Toi Tū, Tāmaki Makaurau
Key awards
2022 — Estuary Art & Ecology Awards: Third Prize (Linger)
2021 — National Contemporary Art Award: Campbell Smith Memorial People's Choice Award (Hope is the Thing with Feathers 2)
2018 — Estuary Art & Ecology Awards: People's Choice Award, joint winner (Early Days)
