You can already see it from some distance: a huge shadow on the wall, the shadow of a standing man, with numerous parallel horizontal lines crossing the image as if we saw the figure's shape through a venetian blind.

And there we are, our eyes fallen into the perception trap:

The horizontal lines are no slats at all but rigid, narrow wooden strips with white varnish, and as it turns out when we approach, the shadow itself is corporeal and three-dimensional, even though of little depth. The infinite succession of horizontal slats, arranged one above the other in identical gaps, are filled with small piles of loose black tea leaves as in miniature shelves. This is how the "man of tea" gets such a lively and, as it seems, accidental inner structure, the nearly chaotic mess standing out from the rigid parallel pattern of the smooth white surface. This person won't crumble into dust, but he will little by little forfeit some of the tea leaves and someone could gradually sweep the man together, brew him up and drink him.

What's astonishing about this is that even after some loss of substance, with quite a few tea leaves having fallen from the shelves, the figure remains visible in his entity. This is because the tea piles in the gaps between the slats don't need to entirely fill those gaps to darken the desired zone: The shadow and the reflective effect of the remaining tea leaves are sufficient to give the shape an entire silhouette.

In his series "Images of reflections", Changwon Lee takes advantage of this observation: The material seems to vanish and even the depicted object seems to become virtual. Voyeurs of art, we peer through two slats, but our expectations are being deceived since there is nothing to be seen but a white wall. Yet there is a picture which, with a distance of only one step, seems to float before our eyes like a shining and slightly diffuse vision. An appearance like a Fata Morgana, bewitching but not really existing.

Whether Lee depicts abstract colour compositions, packagings of cat food or cleansing agents, bikini beauties promoting a lotterie, arthistorical quotations or photographic portraits of his friends ? the principle of the construction remains the same. And, astonishingly, it doesn't even matter if it is realised in a painting or a photograph. He cuts the model in stripes, enlargens it on a grand scale and repaints or prints the mirrored version. When seen closer, the differences of the medium employed becomes apparent: Lee's stroke is rather loose and spacious, and the sweeps of the brush can be seen clearly. From a more remote perspective, however, all the manual brush traces amazingly form a closed impression impossible to distinguish from a photographed one.

The picture stripes cover only the top sides of the slats while the rest of the framework is white so that, looked at from the front, there would be nothing to see . It is the mere reflection of light that synthesizes the isolated horizontal stripes to one entire vertical image on the backside of the picture, which turns out to be the projection surface. When observed from sufficient distance, the silhouette remains closed, the colours become delicate, the outlines blurred and we get the impression of a floating entity. The closer the observer tries to get to the picture and its mystery, the clearer the colours become on those slats which he can now look on from above but the more the closed image decomposes itself into its stripes and parts, too. The magic works from the distance.

Stephan Trescher

(transl. by Hanne Lötters)