Kehan Lai

Thesis

"Kehan lai is a photographer who explores the relationship between the material world, perception, and consciousness. She believes the power rooted in the mundane and transforms her daily surroundings into poetic abstract images with an iPhone camera. She lives in New York and majors in Photography at Parsons School of Design. "

My work explores the relationship between the material world, perception, and consciousness. I use an iPhone camera with inverted color settings and the live mode to create abstract images of my surroundings. I then add a noticeable amount of pixels to the photos during the editing stage. The inverted colors allude to the afterimage/fatigue colors humans perceive and the pixels reference the visual noises.

Growing up under the philosophy of Buddhism, I’m exploring if photography can present a way of seeing that leans towards oneness as opposed to dualism. In the photos, the edges of objects merge into one another; the separation of different entities dissolves, giving an impression of a unifying whole.

I also experiment with minimizing the operation of my consciousness during the image-capturing stage. The live mode captures around 10 frames over three seconds before and after I press the shutter, and the resulting photos are what I called the near-mades. They are moments that would otherwise slip away. And since I’m concerned about projecting mental images to the world to capture it, I move my hands around while pressing the shutter randomly when shooting. I’m guided by the unknown and accompanied by the beauty of accidents.

• Personal Website

• kehanlai.com