BIOGRAPHY

Dino Lee is a Taiwanese photographer, director, and writer.

His photographic practice begins with place, with landscape, and with the conditions of human existence. It attends to time, to memory, and to the changing relation between people and the environments they inhabit. His completed series include Wasteland I: Land of Ghosts, Wasteland II: Plague, Wasteland III: Along Highway 61, and Thus, A Leaf. These works took shape in different times and terrains, yet they converge on a single, persistent question: how we treat and behold the world, and how, dwelling within it, we leave our own traces upon it.

Beyond photography, Dino Lee has long worked in filmmaking, writing, and research. Image and word are two paths in his work that keep crossing. One sets out from the visible: from things, from space, from the experience of perception. The other unfolds from questions, concepts, and argument. Together they form an ongoing practice of making and of thought.

ARTIST STATEMENT

Beyond the reach of language, I think about existence through photography.

The paths of psychology and philosophy have shaped the way I see. I often linger among the relations that the lifeworld passes over: how bodies, objects, and plants appear and vanish in space and time; how a form exists; how it gains its sense of being through its relations with what surrounds it; and how it comes into, or falls out of, connection with the world. Photography lets me look again at what is familiar, what is forgotten, and what has been cast aside. It returns a world once taken for granted to the condition of a question.

The Wasteland series has long been entwined with T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land. I have read and reread the poem closely, and have tried my hand at translating it. Its voices of desire, fragmentation, memory, and death have never ceased to sound within my seeing.

In 2018 I set out from the margins of Taiwan's geography and of everyday life. I entered places seldom looked upon, forgotten, even abandoned. I was searching for the traces people leave upon the land, for forms worn away by time, for moments when life and ruin share the same ground, and for the ways people seek to settle themselves in a drifting world. For me these places are not simply spaces lying somewhere "out there." They are closer to sites of encounter, where familiar orders are momentarily suspended and the desolation of the human spirit is laid bare. Land of Ghosts, Along Highway 61, and Plague, made during the COVID-19 pandemic, are therefore one inquiry unfolding across different places and times.

Thus, A Leaf turns the gaze toward a smaller scale. Through leaf and stem, surface, light, and ground, I want to ask how a living form comes to be seen, and how it exists only by depending on all that surrounds it. Fragility and growth, clarity and blur, emergence and fading are not, it turns out, mutually exclusive states. In the moment of gazing they coexist, and they go on happening.

I am always within the world I look upon. Every act of looking alters my relation to what I photograph, and alters me as well. Photography, then, is for me more than the recognition and recording of what already exists. Certain encounters suspend familiar concepts, so that a thing that could once be named, classified, and understood becomes again a question we do not yet know how to think. What a photograph keeps is therefore more than proof that something once was. It keeps the encounter itself, still unfinished. Through the image, what has not yet entered the concept, and what may for now exceed the very capacity of thought, can remain present, until it compels thought to begin, and compels thinking to go on.