Allister Lee

Photo by Pablo Marques

The ALIST Chinatown World Tour has just kicked off at the Reed Space in New York City.

This eight-city tour is the first solo exhibition of 27-year-old Oakville, Ontario native Allister Lee, a.k.a. ALIST. The well-traveled artist has lived in cities spanning three continents, but wherever his travels take him, there always seems to be a place where he can “chill out, sit, observe, and be totally content” on his own: Chinatown.

Limiting himself to black markers, three colors of water-based paint markers, and black and white aerosol paint, Allister literally draws from the energy with which the ethnic enclave bustles. Allister’s meticulous illustrations are a labor of love and a nod to the global Chinatown community. Aesthetically, according to Jeff Ng, curator of the Reed Space, “it has just the right mix of satire, humor, and street smarts. And visually, it’s just a mind fuck.”

ALIST himself broke it down for Theme.

Theme: What’s the Alist Chinatown World Tour about?
ALIST: It’s to document eight of the world’s most interesting Chinatowns. The first two cities are New York and Toronto, the other six are [potentially] San Francisco, London, Paris, Hong Kong, Tokyo, and Vancouver/Victoria. I’m trying to work through the eight Chinatowns before I turn 35.

How did you get into it?
While living in London, I was either sitting on a lot of money or no money at all. On one of those no-money stretches, I was having a horrible week—waiting for work cheques, my visa papers were running out, up in the air as to what I wanted to do professionally and how to pursue it.

At the end of the day I’m just a guy that can draw pretty good, so I decided to go back to the basics. I took some shoebox paper and a box of markers down to Chinatown, sat on a crate, used another box for a drawing surface, and started to draw the street setting. No penciling, no colors, not concentrating too hard on how things looked.

That was the first time I drew a Chinatown. Every day from 11am to 6pm for a two-week stretch I sat there on a consistent staple of Marlboro Lights, pearl milk tea, coffee, pork buns for lunch and dinner. Just to get the feel of drawing again. Not for a client, not in hopes of doing anything with it, just drawing for drawing’s sake.

This guy that ran the Le Ho Fook building complex saw me drawing every day, he would come over to look at my work over my shoulder but not say anything. I guess one equates street drawing with being poor, which was true at the time. On the third day, he had me in to the restaurant and fed me barbecued pork and rice, and later sent me home with a duck. Later in the week he showed me this place in the alley and said if I wanted to pick a crab I could bring it home. He got me dinner a couple other times while I was drawing. Which I thought was really quite kind of him. With this back-to-basics drawing approach, using black markers, on shitty paper, I was content and Chinatown was taking care of most of my needs. So I kept it mostly black marker on brown paper ever since.

Is there a message you are conveying through your Chinatown work?
Respect others and stay humble. Only a very small percentage of people are able to pursue their creative dreams and make a living off of it. If it wasn’t for the hard work of both my parents, I wouldn’t be in this position to be able to pursue such a leisurely occupation. I would have had to take the first trade or skill or opportunity available and just keep working. ALIST is a fortunate son.