Photo project "Manimals": 12 portraits of animal people based on the Chinese calendar

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2024-01-10 02:10

When Daniel Lee talks about creating his fantastic portraits of animal people, he looks more like a plastic surgeon than a photographer. “I have to replace human eyes with animal eyes, remove the eyebrows and make the nose wider,” says the American photographer and artist of the computer manipulations he performs. What comes out of this is a series of sinister portraits of animal people called "Manimals".

Daniel Lee is busy exploring the human form and relating to our primitive past, drawing inspiration from Darwin's theory of evolution and Buddhist beliefs in reincarnation.

Daniel Lee was born in China and studied in Taiwan studying drawing and painting. He came to the United States in 1970 with the hope of continuing his studies and received his master's degree from the College of Art in Philadelphia in 1972. For some time he worked as an art director. But his desire to use his talent in a more creative way prevailed. Computer manipulation opened up new art forms for him. The artist began to carry out various transformations with photographs in Adobe Photoshop and realized that the freedom of technology inspired him to a more creative and fresh approach. He saw how easily the colors change, the pictures overlap and move. It was the beginning of something new. The result was a project called "Manimals" (people-animals).

“There are still people in China who believe in reincarnation. They believe that in the next or in the past life they were animals or something like that,”says Daniel Lee. He himself believes in Darwin's theory of evolution and therefore seeks a connection between the animal and the human. Deep within our consciousness and our hearts live animal desires, animal savagery and primitiveness. And the photographer is experimenting with these ideas in the "Manimals" project. The 12 portraits correspond to the 12 animals (including the rabbit, bull, horse, tiger and snake) represented in the Chinese calendar. The artist believes that a person is endowed with the behavior, character traits and even physical characteristics of the animal in which he was born. Daniel Lee found models that were born in a specific year and used their human form as the basis for his portraits.

The most important thing about Lee's work is how photographs of ordinary people can be modeled to create a new painting that is both ugly and elegant at the same time. Of course, none of us would want to meet monster people somewhere in a dark street, but the artist shows us what we all hide inside of us, what is waiting for the opportunity to break out.