Elephant in Castle is a 2D digital animation, using a hand-drawn frame-by-frame process to create subtle abstract narratives. Created within the context of two strange years, 2019 and 2020, the work expresses a constant change within the artist’s inner world. It depicts the emotional, aesthetic, and tactile responses that she has to Hong Kong, the city where she grew up. Stepping into a new decade, the world is coming to an unprecedented and critical moment in history. Making these sequences is a reflexive process, on discovering her own subject matter, as well as the complex world she is living in.
Lee was inspired by the research topic and artworks relating to Topophilia, a term from Greek topos. Combining by Topo-, meaning “place”, and -philia, meaning “love of”, Topophilia is a “strong sense of place, which often becomes mixed with the sense of cultural identity among certain people and a love of certain aspects of such a place.” People in a city might come from different places originally, but they all form their own paths of connectivity and responses to the places they inhabit, and even to the particular site that they pass through occasionally. Through her artwork, she wishes to visualise these particular senses of connectivity.