"The sorrowful and floating world with uncertain clouds, is gone with the years like water.”
- Du Mu (Tang)
Watching Kit Lee’s flowers and sea reminds me of the Chinese term "Floating World" (浮世) , used to describe the world where people‘s fate is uncertain and impermanent. When it comes to Kit’s artworks, it is interesting that whether it is a flower in the water, the sea or the screen light rippling in the waves, all are created with computer imaging.
Kit Lee’s new media art exhibition "Floating World" is her first solo exhibition, organised by the Macau Art For All Society, and is one of the 2020 annual exhibitions projects: "New Generation - New Media" - Art Exhibition Series part I for emerging artists. Kit Lee was born in Macau. She graduated from the Department of Mass Communication at Tamkang University in 2009 with a bachelor's degree. Then she went to Taiwan again in 2011-2013 for her master’s degree. In 2014 she returned to Macao to work while writing her thesis. In 2016 she graduated from Tainan National University of the Arts, Graduate Institute of Plastic Arts. Since her return to Macao, she has been working in multimedia design.
During her studies in the Department of Communication, Kit Lee began to study and apply media and video art. Her early works were mostly experimental video art, including information dissemination and popular culture topics, animation production and post-production of video. Compared to the rough texture of the informational images obtained on the mass media, she is also fascinated by the beauty of flowers. Since 2016, she has started a series of flower artworks. Kit Lee uses 3D software to construct the shape and movement of flowers. Post-production software produces "effect in water". Computer-Generated Imagery (CGI) refers to images generated using computer algorithms, referring mainly three-dimensional images that simulate reality and natural forms. The instructions in the algorithm describe a calculation that can be performed from an initial time when executed. The state and the initial input (may be empty) starts, and after a series of finite and clearly defined states finally produces the output and stops at a final state, then loops, and starts again and again. The characteristic of this kind of work is its emptiness. Compared with the "reality" of everything in the world, the flowers of emptiness of Kit Lee are untouchable, and there is only silence in a dark profundity.
In the years after returning to Macao, Kit felt that she has once lost her direction. She was engaged in design work in commercial institutions. She was surrounded by the Macao gaming and hotel industries. Where is the pure land of silence in the commotions of life? For the artist, the creative space is this pure land, in which Kit Lee has planted flowers and made the sea. The sense of oppression coming from the outer world is released through the space of virtual art. This space is full of plasticity. The digital creation and installation series of Kit Lee’s "Sea-Faith" simulates a screen in the centre of the sea and reflects an electronic light with which we are all too familiar in our daily lives. This imagination turned into virtual reality is a powerful scene. The dynamics of the sea are deep and slow, driving the uneasiness of floating. Every day we bow down and send a mass amount of data in front of the screen of the electronic products. How much happiness and how much grief has we brought?
"A hundred years of floating world is like a dream."
If the floating world is a dream, Kit Lee builds dreams in the dream. In between emptiness and forms, all is projected by the mind and stopped by the mind.
Curator
Alice Kok