Connecting to the inner experience
Moreover, Lee’s dark, strange, mixed landscapes also resist the received meanings of Taiwan’s cultural symbols. Raw Soul makes us feel somewhat unsettled. Even though the collection presents familiar scenes and objects from daily life, Lee has turned these into eerie, uncanny presences. Importantly, he does not deliberately create this uncanny atmosphere (if he did, this would amount to the adoption of a preconceived visual style). Rather he puts aside his own consciousness and accepts the chaotic and mercurial textures of Taiwanese culture. In reading Lee’s photographs, we find ourselves departing from the realm of known symbols and venturing into a world of unknown modes of being.
While light is intrinsic to our visual sense, Raw Soul is about darkness, strangeness, sound, intensity, rhythm, fluidity, and life force. This “inner experience” is stripped of the affectations of civilization, bringing us back to our mothers’ wombs, where we lay listening to various sounds around us, our eyes having yet to open for the first time. We are thus invited to reconnect with Taiwan’s primordial inner sounds. What is intriguing is that Lee, instead of using sound as a medium, draws on the visuality of photography to generate auditory‡visual synesthesia.