Hakka, American, and French-Polynesian artist Alexander Lee's multi-disciplinary process based practice reflects on the world through the layered lens of a pluri-cultural-nomadic-ethnic subject, taking Tahiti as a site for anthropic and futures narratives. The artist lives and works in Tahiti and New York. — alexanderleestudio.com
Kainoa Lee and Audrey Lee re-enact Alexander Lee’s First Sight in 2020.
Images courtesy the Artist
When I was 9 years old, my Dad bought me a little cheap snapshot camera and took me to Seaworld. It was my first time there ever, all the way in Honolulu from Papeete, and I was fascinated by the seal show. I must have used 2 rolls of film on it. When we got the prints back, my father looked at them and said “why did you take so many pictures of the same thing?” I looked at every single one of the shots and laid them out one next to the other and thought “they are not the same thing, they are stills from an event. It is a movie in pictures.”
The hotel we were staying at had the largest mirror of any bathroom I had ever seen. I stood in front of it and took a picture of myself through the mirror, with the flash on. This was 1983. Selfies did not exist back then, nor did social media, but it was my first self portrait. When we came home, my cousin saw the printed picture and said “wow it’s like you took a picture of yourself taking a picture!” I was glad he got it.
Today as an artist interested in gesture and image making, I ponder our relationship with technology and how it has enabled us to record our humanity... and I wonder: if all machine eyes were connected to the same mind, who’s looking at whom?
— Alexander Lee