Kevin Lee / DREAMING
夢 DREAMING is a photobook containing photo essays and 35mm film photographs taken over 8 weeks traveling Asia alone, reflecting on the incredibly personal mental space a language and culture barrier creates.
I hand bound each copy, printing, cutting, and glueing the pages together, and laser cutting the covers. I sold a limited run of them and shipped around the world.
DREAMING was featured at the Tokyo Art Book Fair in 2022 at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo.
This project was deeply personal, containing reflections on my heritage.
This project was deeply personal, containing reflections on my heritage.
Excerpt from the foreword:
I spent two months wandering Asia alone in 2019, meditating in the incredibly personal mental space a language and culture barrier creates. Crowded public spaces took on a dream-like quality, as if they existed solely for myself as places to both confront and embrace a surreal familiarity - the familiarity of a First Home, experienced through memories of color and spice and foreign tongues spoken in adopted homes. The East is at once immediate and inaccessible, a place imagined but never fathomed in its whole, its realities and complexities a sensory overload for those who have long walked the lonesome path of diaspora.
Suddenly I found myself overwhelmed with a litany of colors, each one more resonant than the last, their understated vibrancies completing empty chords within me: the jade of faded ads, the soft filtered gold of the Asian sun, the screams of neon, the gaudy brilliance of bus sides and bus seats, the piercing blue of the shadows cast by salarymen and their briefcases, the eggshell white and cream of the lines drawn on the regal Toyota Crown.