The Passage of Time II

Artist Yen-Hua Lee has been collecting vintage books from around the world since 2006. This work is based on a book by American writer Stephen Vincent Benet, Published in New York in 1942, the book covers short stories and poems.
With her background in Chinese calligraphy and traditional painting, Lee creates artwork that is full of spirit and expresses philosophical ideas through various symbols. Her drawings on the book’s pages create a dialogue that transeconds through time and space with the author of the book.
Lee takes each set of pages and illustrates on them, as if they were the front cover of the book. Furthermore, the pages are arranged from top to bottom and left to right, which is the way Chinese characters are arranged in writing. The viewer can see the relationship between two different cultures in the Chinese arrangement of English text. Different possibilities of communication—between the pages, the writer and the artist, or the outer and the inner—are thus unfolded before us.