Yee The Boys
Lester Prize 2025
Year
2025
Materials
Oil on aluminium panel
Exhibition
2025 Lester Prize Exhibition, Western Australian Museum Boola Bardip.
Key Questions
What does it feel like to be seen or unseen?
What does it mean to be seen?
What does being seen afford someone?
Description of the work
Yee the Boys is a vivid exploration of Asian masculinity, identity, and presence in contemporary Australia. Through colourful, boldly patterned figurative works, the series celebrates visibility while disrupting narrow cultural stereotypes that have historically rendered Asian men invisible or one-dimensional in art and popular media.
Bridging humour, intimacy, and defiance, Yee the Boys offers portraits that are both deeply personal and culturally resonant. The works invite viewers to consider how bodies, fashion, and gesture communicate power, play, and belonging in a shifting multicultural landscape. Through painting, pattern, and saturated colour, the series reframes Asian male subjectivity as unapologetically expressive and dynamic, positioning it firmly within broader conversations of representation, identity politics, and contemporary portraiture.
Yee the Boys, 2025, 160x120cm
Finalist in the 2025 Lester Prize
Mike, Andy and Chris Yee are well known entrepreneurs and artists who represent the Chinese Australian community in their work. We are distant cousins however organising this painting was our first time meeting. The painting is part of a broader series in which I have painted Asian men in bold, bright colours and patterns to juxtapose their physical appearance with their stereotype (quiet, shy, meek...). While their clothes scream "LOOK AT ME", their postures and expressions ask "WHAT ARE YOU LOOKING AT?" This tension between visibility and invisibility reflects an experience many Chinese Australians will have found familiar at some stage.
