PATRICK PHILIP LEE

"Calling this series 'Different Places' makes clear that it’s not the artist who is identifying with the subject; rather we are. Or perhaps better, we are alternating places with both the artist’s subject and the artist, engaged in seeing what Lee is seeing. To shift places is not about identity, which is a static, solid, and external thing placed over a subject. Rather, it is about the act of identification, which is fluid, improvised and partial, a verb not a noun, always in process. To identify with someone is a radical form of empathy that causes differences in identity to fall away in favor of similitude. It is also a radical act of sympathy, a forging of a bond that supersedes manifold external and internal differences and acknowledges what is shared. We can and often do identify with people who are manifestly different from ourselves. To do so, entails a kind of translation of our experiences into what we take to be theirs."

- Jonathan D. Katz in "The Art of Translation: The Drawings of Patrick Philip Lee"

"Dakota, the bald guy with the heavy chain around his neck, looks menacing enough, but he is actually an astrophysicist at UCLA. Doubt is built into these works. Lucia, the teenage girl drawn by Lee, is the first female subject he has explored, and her portrait is a picture of contradiction. Self-conscious and confident, tentative and self-possessed, she can be the very opposite of how she seems. A storm surge of adolescent angst is visible in the suspicious questioning eyes and the firm closed-off mouth."

"To argue that the drawings of Patrick Philip Lee are translations seems obvious. But they are more than that; they are a kind of flypaper, trapping us into stilling the process of automatic recognition and forcing an attentiveness to their slow alternation between one medium and substance and another. They catch us catching ourselves in the arc of this movement, which is to say that they make us tarry in the space between person and portrait, as one thing is in the process of becoming another. As a drawing of a face turns into a person we can instantly recognize, and perhaps even claim to know or understand, the monochrome, textured quality of the artwork, its manifest density of marks and slow accumulation of textures amid hours of labor, slow us down, enforcing a careful study of how this illusion has been achieved. We no longer stare at the totality of the portrait as a holistic thing, but register its part-by-part relations, the steady accumulation of partial effects and details as they build toward the whole."

- Jonathan D. Katz in "The Art of Translation: The Drawings of Patrick Philip Lee"

"To translate from my experience to another's isn’t an appropriation of their experience, for how can I appropriate what I don’t know? It is rather a projection, a makeover, a sharing of emotion that is profoundly intimate. Whether the translation is accurate or true is beside the point; what matters is that we take on another's subjectivity as if it were our own. After all, to translate is to try to speak in another's language. And in recognizing what we share, how we are alike despite our differences, translation replaces a framework of difference with a framework of commonality. This is a species of love, and Lee's portraits are absolutely infused with it."

- Jonathan D. Katz in "The Art of Translation: The Drawings of Patrick Philip Lee"