Born in 1976 in Malaysia, Sinje Lee has been passionate about performing and movies since she was a child. When she was in high school, she was discovered by director Sylvia Chang Ai-chia and came to Taiwan to pursue her dreams. She started her career in singing and later moved on to acting in movies and won the New Talent Award at the Berlin Film Festival for her performance in Betelnut Beauty, which was her first leading role in a film.

A four-time nominee of the Golden Horse Awards, Lee won Best Actress at both the Golden Horse Awards and the Hong Kong Film Awards for her role in The Eye, a hit Mandarin horror film. Known for her emotionally complex and refined acting, Lee has been invited to take part in big transnational film productions in Asia, including The Thieves and The Garden of Evening Mists. She debuted as a producer for the film, Abang Adik, which was selected for the Golden Horse Film Project Promotion (FPP) and won the FPP Visionary Award. Lee has also toured in China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan with over 30 theater performances. In addition to singing and acting, she is also an avid writer. Her first book, Embrace Sinjie, was published in 2002, followed by a children’s illustration book and a compilation of her writing and photography.

Her first exhibition, Hum: Sinje Lee Solo Exhibition, was presented in 2011 at the Tina Keng Gallery in Taipei, Taiwan, and she also presented her art at the 2019 Art Expo Malaysia presented at the MATRADE Exhibition and Convention Centre in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

Why I Started to Paint

The sky was gray that year. My beloved grandmother had passed away. On the streets of a foreign land, the busier I was, the lonelier I felt. Under a dim street light, my lonely shadow was shattered into pieces.

I would often take baths in scalding hot water and hear my hot tears trickle down into the water, drop by drop, before turning into vapor and ascending into the air.

One day, I rented a French film from a video rental store. The movie, Mina Tannenbaum, tells the story of a beautiful and talented girl with a passion for painting. After her appearance is disfigured in a car accident, her fate takes a drastic turn and slips into a dark abyss. In the end, the girl chooses to end her young life in a cramped and suffocating painting studio.

The film’s final scene pauses on her still beautiful but frail body. She lies quietly in paintings with vibrant and chaotic colors. Mina’s silent sadness seemed to have walked from the movie into my heart, and it then met the gray sky.

From that day on, I began to paint. In that world of colors, whether I mutter in whispers of darkness or light, the outcome would always be harmoniously calm. All that is not understood would become transfixed in the paintings as the pigments dry out. I painted with my whole heart, in order to add different colors to that gray sky.