Green screen technology allowed much of what is considered “modern breakthroughs” in cinema to happen – particularly its use in the 1999 film classic The Matrix. Previously unimaginable landscapes rendered through digital creativity paved the way for countless science-fiction and fantasy movies to come to life, so to speak. Yet throughout all that, they remain mostly as they are—imagined, surreal fantasies as fictional as they can be.

Celine Lee stages an arrangement of mirrors that are actually used as photography surfaces. Images gleaned from her immediate surroundings are digitally altered to remove parts where sunlight is captured – the brightest part to be precise; ironically an act that somewhat “blocks the sun.” Then, subverting the role of gallery lights to illuminate artworks, they instead become complicit in a gesture that throws the image outside of its “canvas” and into a detached space which is the gallery wall.

In a way, it recalls Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, the images on the wall emanating from an unseen fire simulating reality for those chained to the opposite side. The advancements in human technology have allowed such projections to be almost indistinguishable from reality. For those who have experienced such a phenomenon: where the sun’s reflection casts abstracted shapes and imagery on a random surface – a beautiful manifestation of nature – the experience of the exhibition is precisely that, except for the fact that it is entirely a simulation—a green screen that subverts reality. As artificial lights supplant the natural, the “beautiful” that exists, exists not as the original source but rather a displaced yet completely faithful reconstruction of the experience.

The top pandemic software application Zoom allows a virtual background, as if a virtual meeting wasn’t surreal enough. It provides a green screen option that, once selected, superimposes a chosen image or scene to your background. Interestingly, a green screen – also referred to as chroma key – is not even needed, as a background that has even just a tinge of green acts as the colour marker. If a solid background does not exist, the software still isolates whatever is green and substitutes it with the image regardless of how complicated or nonsensical it presents to be. It bears a direct similarity to the body of work for this exhibition, as the greens approximate the part where sunlight hits the mirror. Captured via a photograph and the image masking as a physical activity by the artist assisted by a computer, the remaining selection is memorialised as shadows on the wall.

No matter how you look at it, a paradox of some sort persists. Human accessing virtual, virtual needing human input, input needing virtual translation, and then is subject to human comprehension. One cannot help but ponder, as with the laws of Science, is there any permanent change or transformation in this process?

With the mirrors arranged in the central area of the space, and some hanging close to the ceiling, the viewer is invited to walk around to an experience – as well as to disrupt it. Every now and then someone will block the light from the ceiling or reflected by the glass; such moments create parallels to what the Japanese refer to in classical haikus and popular music as “komorebi” – literally sunlight shining through the trees. A dappling, rippling motion of shadow and light captures deep thoughts and evokes a gesture of time passing, of change. Yet here, the gesture in itself is – in a way – a fallacy, being a simulacra of sunlight, both sensory and visually.

Core to the exhibition is the notion of transmutation—with definitions ranging from the alchemical: turning any object into gold, or as in nuclear physics: from one element to another. Within this transmutability, the artist ponders the relativity of light and shadow, her chosen elements, at work. Shadows are contingent on a light source, and light in itself requires a reference to ascertain its “lightness.” It calls into question the truthfulness of the experience of art: is it activated by the presence of a viewer, or does it maintain the quality of being art all throughout? In this metaphor of shadows, is the art the shadow that relies on the light of human thought to exist, or is the human condition the lingering silhouette after the brightness of a work of art is cast upon us?

The individual works bear complex images – grillwork, plant fronds, among others – but as a photograph printed onto a mirror, it loses all detail once light hits and dissolves into shadows. It might be easy to get lost in awe with the reflections and shadows on the walls, and mirrors bear the inherent task of being a selfie accomplice. Perhaps one can use the time spent at the exhibition to discover more than what is on the reflective surface, “fact check” the source vis-a-vis its projection. Not unlike the internet, despite being a repository of millennia of human knowledge, it is also a bog that spews illiteracy, post truths—and innumerable thoughts lost in translation. The lesson of the allegory of the cave is for people to realise a desire for a truth, yet it also bears the reality that some eventually prefer and can only accept life in a simulation.

As the notion of shadows permeate Lee’s body of work, it is worth pointing out that her practice does more of interrogating the tenets of art that current society produces, encounters, and exemplifies. Perhaps art is the green screen that transmutes what is fatefully mundane into an elevated experience, regardless of the truthfulness of the experience – yet still leaves the choice to its viewer. To quote the movie, it is like being asked to decide between a red pill and a blue pill; and this duality of choice between ignorance and bliss is addressed by situating the viewer right in the middle and all around it.