The work of critically acclaimed New Zealand digital artist Jae Hoon Lee speaks to the subjective impulse of the traveller, which strives to see the terrain through that traveller’s own story. Lee’s expert digital enhancement of landscape images, captured around Aotearoa, reveals the mutability of our experiences as travellers. We collect views, capturing place but always through our own viewfinders, as part of our own personal stories.

In this commission, Lee’s work becomes the illuminated spine for Cordis Auckland as works are located in all 17 of the Pinnacle Tower’s lift lobbies. Lee presents a progression of digitally collaged images, which thematically traverse the terrain from earth, through fire, to water and wind. For Lee, his images do not capture a single moment but are, instead, multiple instances that are collapsed, via digital manipulation, to create alternative readings that invite the viewer to imagine landscapes anew, as subjective expressions of their own personal world.

To create these works, Lee seamlessly layers multiple images so that the resultant image appears untouched but it captures an unknown and often impossible landscape. This combination of documentary realism with surrealist collage offers a commentary on the slippery processes of visual perception. We remember landscapes through a combination of contextual vision, associative connotation and personal narrative, all of which balloon in our minds in different ways, forming unique and sometimes opposing memories of a single moment.

For Cordis Auckland, Jae Hoon Lee’s lightboxes represent a transition from dark to light – of te whai ao. From the darkness of the soil, through to the bright, light, windy skies of Tāmaki Makaurau, each of Lee’s images is elemental, speaking to the forces that have formed Auckland. Lee draws on a Buddhist perspective of material reality, which consists of the four different elements of earth, water, fire and wind. Earth is characterised as a solid, foundational element that nurtures and supports flora and fauna. Water is a flexible and transformational quality, which helps to achieve a harmonic balance between different sources. Fire is described as a heat and energy source that makes things grow and flourish, and wind is portrayed as the light and movable quality of nature, such as that which carries a seed to soil or a bird to its nest.

These four elements are shared by all living things, with the grounding forces of earth, the harmonising qualities of water, the energy of fire and the mutability of wind forming a structure that guides both humans and nature. This oneness between humans and the natural world upholds Māori notions of kaitiakitanga, underpinning the spiritual guardianship and principles of sustainability that will ensure a harmonious and environmentally responsible future in Aotearoa.

Jae Hoon Lee has created 18 new photographic lightbox works and two photographs for Cordis Auckland, which are located throughout the hotel.

Photographer: Sam Hartnett. Images courtesy of the artist.