Winner of The Biography Prize, University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa
Selected for The Straits Times “7 Books to Look Forward To in 2022”
https://www.straitstimes.com/life/arts/7-books-by-singapore-writers-to-look-forward-to-in-2022
Finalist for the 2023 Singapore Book Awards in Best Nonfiction Title; winner to be announced on 6 September 2023
https://www.singaporebookpublishers.sg/page/book-awards
Critical Reception
“In Searching for Lee Wen, both the biographer Chan Li Shan and her subject the late Singaporean artist Lee Wen undergo constant battles to make art with true authenticity.”
2023 ‘Art as Searching’, Suspect Literary Journal, USA.
https://singaporeunbound.org/suspect-journal/2023/5/26/art-as-searching
“If you’ve ever wondered about the littlest bit about Lee Wen or what art ‘means’, Searching is bound to open your eyes. “
2022 ‘Chan Li Shan’s Searching For Lee Wen dives into the life and mind of the celebrated performance artist’, Plural Art Magazine, Singapore.
“Searching For Lee Wen is a biography written out of an abundance of respect and a complicated love.”
2022 Book reviewed in “Searching For Lee Wen is a complex look at an iconic artist”, The Straits Times, Singapore.
Endorsements
Professor Kristiana Kahakauwila, author of This is Paradise: Stories (Hogarth, 2013):
“I was delighted when I found Chan Li Shanʻs Searching for Lee Wen in my mailbox, and
now even more so to be reading it. The book is structured in short chapters that resemble
portraits. I am most moved by the interactions between author and artist, the dance of
trust and fear, and the way Li Shan builds a narrative out of nonlinear moments in time.
Thanks to this work, Iʻm understanding new levels of biography and the relationship
between biographer and subject.”
Professor Craig Howes, Director, Center for Biographical Research; Professor of English, University of Hawai’i at Mānoa:
“In Searching for Lee Wen, Chan Li Shan offers readers a biography of a fascinating and important performance artist; a memoir of her own experience as his biographer, collaborator, and friend; and an innovative, nuanced, often moving mosaic of interview excerpts, testimonials from friends and admirers, timelines linking Singapore’s history to Lee Wen’s own, striking photographs, and meditations on the act of representing a life. The result is a memorable book, in which both Lee Wen and Chan Li Shan are ‘interfused, liminally, between being a sign, a signal and a person, enigmatically within, yet beyond each’—truly ‘an elusive joy to watch.”
Professor Tommy Koh, Founding Chairman, National Arts Council:
“I congratulate Chan Li Shan for having written this beautiful biography of Lee Wen, who died too soon from Parkinson’s disease. At the age of 30, Lee Wen gave up a secure and stable career in a bank to study art. He would devote the rest of his life to the practice of art in its many forms: drawing, painting, poetry, songs, installation and performance. George Bernard Shaw once said that the world consists of two kinds of people: reasonable people and unreasonable people. The reasonable people are those who conform to the world. The unreasonable people are those who seek to change the world. Lee Wen was an “unreasonable” man and artist. Lee Wen once described himself as a soldier of culture. He fought many battles for culture and art. His victories were not unnoticed. He was awarded the Cultural Medallion in 2005. We will never forget him as the Yellow Man and The Sun Boy.”
T. Sasitharan, Director, Intercultural Theatre Institute:
“We like to pretend that biographies are ‘objective’. That the truth they bear is untainted by bias or partiality or opinion. That they are pristine. Nothing is further from the truth. Biographies are fiercely subjective and born of one person’s obsession with someone else’s life. The obsessiveness is not only for the storyline or narrative, but the telling of it. And the telling of the life story of an artist like Lee Wen—significant, protean, impulsive, explosive, brutally honest—demands an obsessive storyteller. Li Shan dives headlong into the minutiae of Lee Wen’s life, disregarding guardrails of convention and is sometimes eccentrically selective. She is desperately seeking line and colour, and motif and sfumato; yearning for composition that is him. The result is bricolage, cracked, disrupted, dismembered. But beyond the veil of the tale, as the clouds of dissonance disperse, something of a shape emerges; distinct and hewn by instinct, intimacy and understanding. A Lee Wen shape.”
Cyril Wong, poet and fictionist:
“Flickering with exacting yet poignant insights while balancing anecdote, lyricism, curated imagery, laudatory response and verbatim record, this biography delicately deconstructs linearity without compromising on a heartfelt and multifaceted picture of a performance art icon.”
Author Events and Interviews
2023 Podcast interview #105 with Lisa Napoli from Biographers International Organization, USA.
https://biographersinternational.org/news/podcast/podcast-episode-105-li-shan-chan/
2022 Email interview with Pat Matsueda, Managing Editor for MĀNOA literary journal 1992-2022, USA.
https://www.auteurlimits.com/interviews/searching-for-lee-wen
2022 Book session for “Searching for Lee Wen” at Georgetown Literary Festival. Penang, Malaysia.
https://www.georgetownlitfest.com
2022 Book talk on “Writing Lives”. Epigram Coffeeshop, Singapore Art Museum, Singapore.
2021 “On Writing a Life”, Speaker, Biography Brown Bag Fall 2021 Series, University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, USA.
2019 “Seven Uses of the Imagination in Biography Writing”, Speaker, International Auto/Biography Association Asia-Pacific Life Writing Conference, Shanghai.
http://www.sclw.sjtu.edu.cn/IABA2019
Book and e-book availability
EPIGRAM BOOKS: https://epigrambookshop.sg/products/searching-for-lee-wen-a-life-in-135-parts
GOOGLE PLAY:
https://play.google.com/store/books/details/Chan_Li_Shan_Searching_for_Lee_Wen?id=HA
J6EAAAQBAJ
AMAZON: https://www.amazon.com/Searching-Lee-Wen-Life-Parts-
ebook/dp/B0B64736CB
BARNES AND NOBLE: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/searching-for-lee-wen-chan-li-shan/1141746132
CHAN LI SHAN 