Highland Musée and other Studios

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Highland Musee This private Musée established by artist Shee in the northern cultural suburb of Chicago is devoted exclusively to collecting and exhibiting more than 100 pieces of his major work in oil paintings and sculptures. In addition to Musée Highland he also spends a few months a year working at the studios in Paris and Taipei, Taiwan.

Dr G. Groom, Curator of the Art Institute of Chicago has said “his art is a great sincerity and a sense of joy which consoles like music filled with harmonious chords.”

The late Kathryn Hixson, widely known and admired for her work in Chicago as an art critic, teacher, historian, curator and enthusiastic champion of art has written, “One of the most striking characteristics of Shee’s paintings is his affinity for reflection. Over and over he focuses on the reflections of nature in lake, ponds, and flowing rivers as a way of recollecting his memories and experiences in life. Trees, birds, animals, people, and the tumultuous sky are painted not as direct representations, but as reflections in bodies of water, the mother of life. These reflections symbolize meditation, a transference from direct experience to one meditated by its representation – experience filtered through a fond picturing of it.

For Shee, reflection characterizes the human relationship to time, either the remembered past or an uncertain future. Each of us are constantly moving and shifting, as are natural elements around us. In his paintings, Shee offers transient glimpses of time standing still – opportunities for contemplation. Continual motion of clouds, rippling of waters, forever changing light–frozen in Shee’s paintings –give us the opportunity to meditate on our personal search for peace and happiness.”