Daniel Lee

Beginning from stark portraits photographed with a large format camera, Daniel Lee submits his pictorial subjects to the digital wringer, provoking their unsettling metamorphosis into animal-like forms. He appropriately entitled these series 'Manimals', 'Judgement', '108 Windows', 'Origin' and 'Nightlife' initially shown at O.K. Harris Works of Art Gallery in New York since 1993, in addition, these works attracted the attention of publications like PBS Television, New York Times, American Photo, Zoom, Wired, Art Life, Harper's, Creative Technology magazines and gallery and museum exhibitions in France, Italy, England, Japan, Slovakia, Philippines, Taiwan, Portugal, Canada and Austria quickly followed.

Known as Lee Siaojin in Chinese, born in Chunking, China (1945) and raised in Taiwan. He moved to United States after he received his BFA in painting from College of Chinese Culture. Then he got his MA degree majored in Photography and Film from Philadelphia College of Art and worked as an Art Director in New York until the late seventies, at which point he changed to photography as a career. Within one and a half decades, he went through different stages in fashion, people to still life collage. Since 1993, computer technology allowed him to combine his various drawing, photographic and fine art skills in one medium.

"Science has allowed the possibility of extending our lives, but has never satisfied humanity¹s greed. The replacement of diseased or aged organs with healthy ones is now the key to longevity. Benefiting from stem cell and the decoding of animal DNA, the acceptance of organs from our fellow animals eventually would provide us with a fresh stock of donors.

I've been informed that pigs are biologically more similar to humans than sheep and in some cases even more compatible to us than monkeys.

I invite you to a not too distant future in a location populated with a breed of livestock that supplies human eyes, hearts, livers and other harvested organs. In generations to come, these animals will become more than organ hosts, they will incorporate the science that created them, evolving with traits and behaviors that are distinctly human.

In the world of these new creatures, I see a discovery of joy and sorrow, which would in many ways be similar to ours. As a result, the success of science would inevitably raise greater questions once againŠ

Daniel Lee 2004

Pressetext

Daniel Lee
Harvest 2004