IN CONVERSATION: ELIZABETH GABRIELLE LEE

Elizabeth Gabrielle Lee illustrated by Maria Chen

DATE

2025/12/26

ARTICLE

Maria Chen

PHOTOS

Darius Šerkšnas, Urich Lau, Elizabeth Gabrielle Lee, Federico Ruberto.

Inside the Mind of Elizabeth Gabrielle Lee: From Singapore Alleys to London’s Neo-Gothic

Elizabeth Gabrielle Lee’s practice moves through thresholds—between cities, cultures, bodies, and belief systems—probing the psychic residue left behind by systems of control, excess, and desire. Born and raised in Singapore and now living between London, Athens, and Singapore, Lee’s work is shaped by a distinctly diasporic sensibility: one attuned to liminal spaces, estranged inheritances, and the uneasy coexistence of order and entropy that defines many hyper-managed urban environments.

Growing up amid wet markets, mangroves, aquarium shops, jade counters, and the quietly charged back alleys of Singapore, Lee developed an acute sensitivity to spaces that appear mundane yet are saturated with presence and loss. These early environments—constantly terraformed, erased, and remade—continue to inform her artistic language, which draws from the neo-gothic, post-tropical ecologies, and unseen infrastructures that underpin everyday life. Across film, performance, installation, and public programming, Lee examines how desire, excess, and spirituality circulate through systems designed to suppress them.

Lee is one of the participating artists in the Singapore Biennale 2025, which unfolds under the theme Pure Intention. Conceived as an invitation to reconsider sincerity, ritual, and presence within the city, the Biennale frames Singapore not only as a site of efficiency and governance, but as a living platform shaped by accumulated gestures, beliefs, and lived contradictions. Pure Intention asks what it means to act with clarity and conviction in a place built on regulation and seamlessness—and what is lost, erased, or disciplined in that pursuit.

Presented at the former Raffles Girls’ Secondary School campus, Lee’s contribution, TOTAL-PLEASURE-SUITE, complicates this call for purity by staging a confrontation between intention and contamination, control and surrender. Through a baroque assemblage of industrial remnants, nightlife ephemera, and performative activation, the work proposes pleasure and excess as neo-gothic forces—entities that resist management and unsettle the myth of refinement. In doing so, Lee’s practice resonates deeply with the Biennale’s premise, not by affirming purity as an ideal, but by exposing its fragilities, violences, and psychic costs.

In this conversation, we speak with Elizabeth Gabrielle Lee about heritage and alienation, diaspora and movement, pedagogy and collaboration, and the evolving concerns that continue to shape her work—from the unseen architectures of hypermodernity to the haunted terrains of the post-tropical imagination.

CREDITS

All works courtesy of the artist

"To me, diaspora means being a free-wheeling entity that moves across spatial and psychic terrains. It’s to be untethered, strange, traversing, lost, and maybe even disloyal to cultural baggage… there’ll always be subparts of the self that desire to interface or merge into another space and time."—Elizabeth Gabrielle Lee

Origins & Early Sensibilities
CNTRFLD. You’ve described growing up in Singapore among wet markets, mangroves, jade counters, aquarium shops and those quietly revealing back alleys. Looking back now, how do you feel your childhood environment—both its intimacy and its tensions—shaped the sensitivities that guide your practice today?

EGL. Over time I’ve (mostly) subconsciously cultivated a sixth sense. Or perhaps it’s an instinct that’s driven by a hunger, a restlessness to gravitate toward the back alleys and the liminal spaces. These sites are ones that seem desolate and mundane but are incredibly potent with immanence. Coming into form as a resident in an environment that operates on a fear of entropy, where it is terraformed, hacked, manicured, and regularly un-heaved, inadvertently immerses you into a container of loss. Since it becomes commonplace for these spaces to never truly remain as they are, there’s a certain degree of anticipation of when they would meet their finality. It’s like living in a terrarium that has a countdown timer displayed on the glass walls, and you’re in constant exposure to when the expiration date comes up and ravishes it all.

CNTRFLD. You’ve spoken before about feeling your heritage both present and rejected in Singapore’s very Western-facing cultural landscape. How did that sense of cultural dissonance shape your early ideas about identity, and do you see those threads resurfacing in the way you build images or tell stories now?

EGL. Alienation is a recurring node within my practice. This was, of course, operating on a subliminal level during the earlier years. I have experienced it and approach it today as more of an ontological flattening, where the layers have been ultimately smoothened to the degree that it became imperceptible. Instead of various cultures butting heads at oppositional dichotomies (East v West, mind v body, master v slave, etc) the dissonance was stamped out and homogenised at the outset, which made there nothing for me to even contend with at the beginning. Of course, as the implicitness of this dissonance grew more explicit over time, the Xeno, the other, and the strange became embedded much more presently into my practice. I see these narrative devices functioning as agents of dissonance, propagating productive friction to open up sites of rupture — which feels apt particularly during this time of what feels to be a rapture.

Identity, Diaspora & Movement
CNTRFLD. You split your life between London and Singapore. On a personal level, what does “diaspora” feel like for you—emotionally, intuitively, even psychically?

EGL. It means to be a freewheeling entity that moves across spatial and psychic terrains. It’s to be untethered, strange, traversal, lost and maybe even disloyal to cultural baggage. There’s a phenomenon called quantum entanglement that has observed how particles that have once bonded, and then spilt apart, will continue to reflect the state of the other, despite the difference. It’s been called a spooky action at a distance by Einstein. What was inflicted on one particle would impact the state of the other. It is innate to be made up of fractured selves, and there’ll always be subparts of the self — diasporic or not — that will subconsciously or consciously desire to move, interface or merge into another space and time.

CNTRFLD. Having lived and worked across multiple cities and artistic ecosystems, what similarities or contrasts have you noticed in the support structures available to artists? How have these differences shaped your own path and priorities?

EGL. The indexing of identity-centric practices and the doubling down of representation. These structures tend to resonate positively toward a universality that transcends languages and speaks transversally. At times, this dis-affords the zany and subterranean that esoteric practices embody, which in my opinion, is an oversight. The creative ecosystem — across cities or cultures — also values more implicit representations which has something I’ve struggled a little bit with, especially with the tendency to veer toward the clandestine and arcane. These points of contention and the pressure to produce work that adheres to a certain pantheon, subculture and the aesthetic sensibilities of the city actually moved me away from producing work that would identify to specific camps. Learning to unbind myself to the ideological and semiotic vocabularies is a tension I’ve come up against when it comes to receiving support, because most of these expect you to operate out from a specific canon, or a school. Perhaps the challenge for us here is to learn how to crystallise these subtleties into something that can be understood across different gradients and thresholds.

CNTRFLD. London has become your main base these past years. What keeps you rooted there as a place to think, make, and teach—and what aspects of Singapore do you find yourself instinctively carrying into your life in London?

EGL. I’m now split between Singapore, Athens and London. I teach in London and spend my other time in Athens, with some Singapore in between. London as a city is challenging on many fronts, and many, as most residents in metropoli do, have a love-disdain relationship with it. I’m no different. But what keeps me there is the anonymity and its vastness, but also the presence that I have been fortunate to carve in my relationships. The city has a porousness to it that attracts the best and worst of transience.

Practice, Research & The Singapore Biennale 2025
CNTRFLD. Your work often probes excess, desire, unseen infrastructures, and the neo-gothic—these thresholds where the visible and invisible rub against each other. How do these interests come together in TOTAL-PLEASURE-SUITE, where performers surrender agency to objects, environments, and the non-human?

EGL. TOTAL-PLEASURE-SUITE is a hyper-physical rendering of the fallacies and limitations, but also the desires and instinctual drives that lie dormant in the metamodern psyche. I created this work with the image of a monolith that is fallible, junky and corruptible. Unlike the monoliths historically encountered in culture (2001: A Space Odyssey, or the ancient Acro Corinth and obelisks), this entity is easily subject to contagion and appropriation, transference and tainted-ness. The spatial design, in collaboration with Federico Ruberto, consists of former school tables from the exhibition site, wrapped with a latex-looking tape, augmented with diamantes and tyre scraps. The ‘suite’ is an attempt at the monstruous return of material excess, utilising signifiers of industrialisation (automotive rubbers), and the nightlife entertainment industry (diamanté strings from Taobao that are commonly used on clothing and costume jewellery worn by hostesses). An ode to buried pleasures and displaced, the suite becomes an altar for these material fragments to — hastily and haphazardly — convene with each other as if they are the very last of their so-called “inanimate” kind amidst the dawn of the human. TOTAL-PLEASURE-SUITE resurfaces the wasted, wretched, and off-kilter of our psychic mis-affordances and trappings through the haunting of the objects of the tropical gothic. The performance, Blasphematics, was an activation of the performers Josh Tirados and Jack. Its core motivation was to subvert the power dynamics of the ‘performance activation’ format, where humans assume the role of key masters, making the non-human object come alive. It posed the question of: what happens if we’re able to allow the less-than-human realm to move through us instead? The soundscape, designed by GODKORINE responded to the prompts of hauntings from the underbellies in the tropical gothic, such as hollowed KTV lounges, desolate strata malls and the ubiquity of blinding LED lights that harshly shove products to be sold to apathetic consumers.

CNTRFLD. At the Singapore Biennale 2025, the theme of pure intention invites audiences to consider how rituals, lived experiences, and everyday environments shape the city and its identity. For readers unfamiliar with the Biennale’s premise, it’s a call to return to sincerity, presence, and unfiltered encounter—especially in a city built on order and control. How does TOTAL-PLEASURE-SUITE speak to this idea of “pure intention,” even as it complicates agency, manipulation, desire, and the body’s relationship to urban space?

EGL. The structure stands in a field, in the former school site of Raffles Girls Secondary school. The work was created in response to drives toward excellence and transcendence that were inherited post-British rule. If we were to work with a tension line, the work flits between the nodes of entropy and the eschaton, reacting to visions of Eden and exaltation. It questions the intentions — be they pure, sacred or benevolent — could truly be portals to an unmasked or unfiltered representation. It asks: what gets erased in the face of this pursuit of management? What lapses in place of purity? Is contagion meant to be rightfully demonised as it has been in this urban consciousness? One of the central theses to the work is that purity begets contamination. Where, purity in its pursuit of refinement and purging, sometimes falters toward ruthlessness, prescriptivism and an essentialism. The work frames pleasure and desire as a form of the neo-gothic, which in the case of purity, is an entity that is managed and mitigated. The suite is named as such in favour of a baroque-ness, for a material excess that lies in place of terraforming and management. I was intent on probing beyond a comfort simulation that has been elegantly constructed under the namesake of progress. TOTAL-PLEASURE-SUITE could be experienced as a point of friction standing in antagonism to the ambient violences of seamlessness.

Teaching, Platforms & Evolving Concerns
CNTRFLD. You teach across the School of Media and Communication at London College of Fashion. How does working with students—many of whom are navigating their own identity formations—shape or challenge your artistic practice? And how do your research interests in memory, ethnography, and representation translate into your approach in the classroom?

EGL. It’s an absolute honour to interface and interact with my students. The students across the programme are an incredibly nuanced and multifarious bunch whose interests are far-reaching and niche. Being able to learn from a younger generation helps to cultivate more of an agnostic approach to my practice, in the way that it’s becoming less defined by medium and responding to the inquiry with the most suitable narrative tool. My research is, in a way, used as mini prototypes that I test out with students, with the interest in their reactions and viewpoints. Sometimes I stress test some of my working hypotheses or use my findings as prompts to talk about in lectures or seminars.

CNTRFLD. You also run XING, which quietly but insistently reshapes conversations around Southeast and East Asian discourse. How has sustaining that platform influenced your own understanding of regional identity and shifted the trajectory of your practice?

EGL. #xingarchives was a research base of images, primarily sourced across the outlets of pop culture. This was developed during the time I launched the photo book, which was a collaborative publication featuring the works of 10 image makers and two writers peering into the images of sexuality of the E/SEA female figure. Over time, with my collaborator Jade Meili Barget, it expanded towards public programmes featuring moving images, sonic and literary works from practitioners based in the region. The projects have shaped my work process in the way that it’s become far more collaborative and interdependent.

CNTRFLD. Across your work—from early explorations of representation and visibility to your current research into post-tropical ecologies and psychospiritual traditions—your concerns have evolved, yet they feel anchored by a constant curiosity about the unseen. How do you see these thematic interests maturing or expanding over time?

EGL. It’s gravitating towards more intangible entities, yet there’s a growing interest to understand the backend infrastructures of our hypermodernity that are also impacting it in the meat space and have outrageously and sometimes horrifyingly tangible impacts. That’s where the notion of excess comes in.

Looking Ahead
CNTRFLD. For young artists, especially those navigating diasporic identities or unexpected interdisciplinary paths, what advice would you share about sustaining a practice that remains intentional, grounded, and true to one’s instincts?

EGL. Practices that are interdisciplinary are ultimately shaped by dissonances and divergences. Even though there may be fear of being a jack of all trades and master of none, expansion is incredibly productive especially at the early stages of one’s practice. And ultimately these paths of friction and static find points of convergences that are rewarding. Not being precious with the outcome will allow for play and serendipitous discoveries in the process of making.

CNTRFLD. And finally—looking beyond the Biennale—are there any current or upcoming projects, experiments, or directions you’re particularly excited about exploring next?

EGL. I’m working on my next film, which is the second instalment in my triptych series that surveys energy infrastructures, technologies of comfort, and the elements and atmospheres that our beings are entangled in. The first film was Tropic Temper which delved into the politics of air, heat, and systems of atmospheric management. The next film will look at electricity as a central node into the inquiry, drawing crossing over with social and cultural motifs of speed, the love economy and the e-commerce industry in Asia.

Singapore Biennale’s Pure Intention

Running until 29 March 2026, the Singapore Biennale transforms the city into a platform for contemporary art. Across multiple venues, site-responsive works explore Singapore’s histories, rituals, and urban rhythms. Hothouse’s outdoor project PRIMAL INSTINCT features Elizabeth Gabrielle Lee alongside Tini Aliman and Salad Dressing, where Lee’s sculptural practice probes thresholds—between bodies, cultures, and belief systems—tracing memory, desire, and the lingering impact of systems of control within the city’s fabric.
In this city-wide stage, Lee’s work—and the other PRIMAL INSTINCT projects—asks: what happens when we stop trying to control the world and let it move through us instead? It’s an invitation to experience Singapore not just as a place, but as a living, shifting ecosystem of energy, bodies, and possibility.

Inside the Mind of Elizabeth Gabrielle Lee: From Singapore Alleys to London’s Neo-Gothic

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