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Artist or Maker: YEE I-LANN

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Notes: The 3 photographic works of Yee I Lann constitutes parts of the photographer's Horizontal series which in assemblage is a series of 12 photographs of varying sizes. The images could be viewed in unity or individually.

In 2003, the photographer became the first recipient of a residency program established by the Australian High Commission Kuala Lumpur which took I Lann to Sydney's Gunnery Studio from 5 February to 26 April 2003.

In the artist own words on the Horizontal series,

"During my recent stay in Australia I became obsessed with the horizon line. I found myself surrounded by this circular continuous line that separated the red disc of earth I stood on from a cloudless blue sky above. There were a few shrubby bushes, the straight road that divided the world in half, my sister's 'Ute' and me. That was it. Nothing yet everything. I would swing from feeling deliriously happy and free to feeling claustrophobic, lost and fearful of such space, of such unknown. And always my eye would stretch to that horizon line...

Back home in Kuala Lumpur and in Sabah I had become used to having my vision restricted by all manner of 'everything' - a building, a monument, a mountain. The obstacles, physical and metaphoric, affected my perspective and influenced my vision, which rarely stretched to see the horizon. I had also become used to being cocooned in the safety of these obstacles, trapped. I would not get carried away and fall off the edge of the world. I would be saved by fencing.

So I took photographs of the Horizons, of the Unknown, to try and know it. The ground appeared closer in my photographs than in others I had seen then I realized this was because I am short and the horizon line teases. I realized the horizon only had significance when it had a referent" (Yee I Lann, Horizon, Valentine Willie Fine Art, 2003).