2011 Anne Landa Award Exhibition Justin Paton Art Gallery of New South Wales Senior Curator at Christchurch Art Gallery From the beginning, photography and tourism have moved in tandem. Almost as soon as photography was invented in the mid nineteenth-century, intrepid photographers were lugging their bulky view cameras and wet-plate technology from Europe to far-off places. Their mission was partly practical, to work as visual surveyors of landscapes rich in potential for expansion and trade. But those practical ambitions were inseparable from a burgeoning appetite for strange and exotic views. For members of the colossal new middle-class audience for photography, postcards and albums offered virtual tours of a world that looked thrillingly different.

That early stream of images has deepened immeasurably in the century-and-a-half since then. Every year an estimated 700 million tourists set out on their journeys, and almost every one of them is carrying a digital camera. Every one of those cameras, in turn, holds an unprecedented quantity of information: why make only one picture of the pyramids of Giza when there’s room on your memory card for a hundred? In fact, considering the predictability of many tourist routes and the sheer ubiquity of digital photography today, carrying a camera to capture the sights can seem comically redundant, because someone has usually taken that picture already. Type ‘pyramids’ into the photo-sharing website Flickr (motto: ‘Watch the world’) and you can make your choice from thousands.

As a collector of photographic sights, Jae Hoon Lee could hold his own against the most image-hungry tourist. In the past four years he has taken thousands of photographs in some highly photogenic locations, from the sacred hills of Nepal and the coastlines of Korea (where he was born) and New Zealand (where he now lives) to an ashram in India. As if to prove himself undaunted by scenic clichés, he’s even taken on the pyramids. But there the resemblance ends. The images that Lee gathers in these places are not fully-formed ‘sights’ but a form of raw material, a harvest of surfaces and details that he brings back with him to New Zealand. Lee’s aim, simply put, is to create photographs that feel as strange and expansive to look at as the places themselves felt to experience, and he does so through a seamless kind of digital collage. Stitching and grafting these scenes together, compressing a multitude of times and views inside one frame, Lee creates worlds where horizon lines bulge with pressure, earth swells and flows like water, and clouds from many countries find themselves inhabiting the same square of sky.

These are travel photographs in an unusually acute sense. Not only do they record places Lee has travelled to, much more importantly they also insist that we travel as viewers – that we find a way into these bizarrely beautiful worlds and then negotiate a visual path through them. Take Trekking, a landscape built from dozens of views that Lee accumulated during a single hour-long walk in the Annapurna range in Nepal. On first glance,

the place he’s created looks dirt-brown and thoroughly unpromising – a wide swathe of stony and slip-ridden country, with a thin scribble of road running through it. But leaning in closer to explore this landscape, it becomes clear something more is afoot. The journey starts calmly enough in the distance in the right-hand corner, where the dirt road enters the image and moves slowly inward. That sense of purpose is shaken, however, mid-way through the composition, where the whole plane of the landscape steepens and sags with the weight of ominous scree slips, and the road itself shifts bizarrely in scale. What looked, for most of its course, wide enough to carry several people terminates in a sudden switchback that appears to have been dragged in loose earth with a stick – as if this mountain were somebody’s sandpit.

For Unguided Tours, Lee has remade Trekking at a size that requires us to move to take it all in. Stretched right across a wall more than eight metres wide, Trekking 2 deliberately echoes the scale of the wall-filling advertising treatments often found in sites of mass transit and tourism: a palm-fringed beach, say, overprinted with the latest flight discounts. But it’s safe to say that Trekking 2 won’t be inspiring any dreams of laid-back leisure. As viewers in front of this photograph, we’re not surveyors of an orderly prospect but involved and possibly overwhelmed participants, clambering for a foothold on the photographic surface. Instead of capturing the view from the top of the mountain, Lee evokes the sensation of moving towards it – the stumbles, the kinetic shifts, the sudden movements from near to far, and the constant play between memory and anticipation, as one view falls behind and another rears up. And with all this comes a literally unsettling hint, which is that some glitch or distortion is rippling through the landscape and attempting to wrong-foot us or shake us off. (Indeed I thought of Lee’s work more than once in the wake of the recent 7.1 earthquake in Christchurch, which shook hundreds of tonnes of rock from a mountain near where I live, leaving behind a landscape of slippage, strange scale and altered coordinates that looked uncannily like parts of Trekking.)

One of the abiding clichés of contemporary life is that the world is getting smaller. Thanks to digital technology, this argument goes, things and places that once were far-flung are now within comfortable reach. Lee’s photographs are surprising and arresting because they turn this argument on its head, using digital photography to restore a sense of largeness and otherness to places worn smooth by over-representation. It follows that, alongside exhilaration and dislocation, the state Lee’s photographs encourage most powerfully is one of humility. Traversing his photographic surfaces, one thing is made very clear: these places are bigger than all of us.

Instead of taking a few photographs of every sight seen along the way, as is the habit of many travellers, Lee bears down with maximum concentration on just a few key locations. Collecting hundreds of images as he explores a site on foot, he then brings them home and brings them together using the computer programme Photoshop – merging some forms, multiplying others, warping both matter and gravity. Far from distorting the landscape for distortion’s sake, Lee’s aim is to evoke the perceptual upheaval that occurs in us when we travel, the feeling of downloading so much new detail with one’s eyes that the mind can barely keep up.

It’s telling that Lee creates this very contemporary sense of movement by calling on one of the oldest landscape traditions there is, namely Chinese ink painting, where the flow of mountains down tall scrolls enacts the Daoist idea of landscape as a living body. In the most overt of these homages, Ha Jo Dae, Lee builds the landscape from repeating rocks, so that we seem not to be travelling from one point to another but rather circling the same landform, reciting its textures, and enlarging the landscape with each pass. A similar phasing of sameness and difference occurs in the video Levitation, where Lee creates an endless stairway of 108 steps from surfaces photographed in many different places, including the lawns of suburban Auckland and an ashram in Rishikesh, India. Judged against the usual narrative conventions, a journey that takes us nowhere is pointless. But Lee is alluding to the 108 steps that often lead to Buddhist temples, and as the video continues it becomes very clear that the climbing is the point. Conflating the tedium of a mechanical escalator with the mesmerizing rhythms of a mantra, Levitation is a plausible incarnation of what Nam June Paik called ‘Zen TV’.