Inspired by the American Pattern & Decoration movement, Lee and Bruton created a new type of abstraction that made a clever use of traditionally feminine decorative elements – like patterning, beading and collage – to dismantle the hierarchy of fine art over craft. In doing so, they raised questions about the validity of the modernist conventions and reclaimed the position of women within the history of painting.

As opposed to the shocking works of the YBAs - who emerged in the same years - Lee and Bruton created deliberately beautiful, highly ornate canvases that were seemingly easy on the eye and on the mind. Their paintings don’t have a single focal point but are composed of a myriad of painstaking details, which can be truly seen only by actively exploring the paintings’ surface from edge to edge (a type of perception called ‘haptic vision’).

Part of the Hong-Kong diaspora, Lee used painting to pursue the creation of a new visual language, described as an arabesque dance ‘with threads to mend and extend’. Her large-scale canvases are heavily layered with skeins of paints in wave-like forms, creating optical illusions. Her sources were both Western, with Bridget Riley and the writings of Jacques Derrida being hugely influential, and Asian, with calligraphic abstraction underpinning her entire practice. Sadly, Lee passed away at barely 52 years old, so her burgeoning career was cut short. Yet, she contributed greatly to the development of contemporary painting and feminist theories, having written many essays on the topics and a key text (Resisting Amnesia: Feminism, Painting and Postmodernism, Feminist Review, 1987) re-situating feminism within art historical tradition.