Spent

About the Work

In Paul Pak-hing Lee's 1998 print Spent, each photo interacts with the one below in different ways, creating visual and poetic puns that are central to Lee's work. The first photo in descending order is a man riding a bull at a county fair. The rider looks like he could leap over the highway bridge in the photo below it. The third is a picture of a windmill flipped on its side—did the bull rider knock it over? The windmill turns into the propeller on the biplane flying over a landscape filled with mountains and pyramids. The ice-cream overflowing in a vanilla milkshake in the photo below looks like the snow-capped mountains from the landscape above—or are they fluffy like the clouds below in the final photo?
_{—From Brandywine Workshop and Archives records}