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Landscape in the Mist

Tomorrow-May 21, noon-10pm

Economist Gallery, Fringe Club

Film director and photographer Julian Lee is a romantic. Years ago, he fell in love under a lighthouse. His exhibition, Landscape in the Mist, reflects this yearning to capture the emotions of falling in love and a landscape's beauty.

When Lee's not working as assistant professor of the School of Creative Media at City University, he journeys to extremes, from such places as the barren Nordic landscape of Iceland to the northern tip of Hokkaido.

'I wanted to capture everything - the experience of being there and bring back that sensation,' Lee says.

Merging digital photography onto an LCD monitor or plasma screen, Lee has created a digital canvas. However, this Royal College of Art graduate takes it one step further by adding an interactive element to the timeless landscapes. 'I didn't want to force viewers to watch a video or photo album,' he says. 'It has a photo aesthetic - not an interaction of blasting movement, but the sense of a beautiful photograph.'

Mounted in a specially built room, each of the four works has a distance sensor. As a viewer approaches, an element of the mainly grey landscapes subtly changes. In the title work, Landscape in the Mist, encroaching trees and a horseman statue gradually become more shrouded in mist, until there's just a haze of silhouettes.

To the Lighthouse has a tall beacon set on the edge of a long pier. As the viewer walks closer, the lighthouse's red light glows brighter. 'It's a romantic painting.' Lee says. 'The lighthouse is a symbol of love.'

Lee says his works are digital versions of the sorts of paintings from which he takes his inspiration by 18th- and 19th-century romantic painters such as Caspar David Friedrich and Arnold Bocklin.

2 Lower Albert Rd, Central. Inquiries: 2521 7251

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