by Sue Weekes, Editor/Creative Technology (England)

Daniel Lee’s bizarre half-man, half-animal characters, or ‘Manimals’, have been known to turn a few heads. We had people literally turning over the cover proofs in the office this month because they found the images too disturbing to look at. When told of this response to his work, the Chinese-born photographer shifts the emphasis back onto the person viewing the image. ‘Maybe they are running away from something,’ he says, ‘Nobody has seen anything like these creatures before and the fact that they look so real makes them very disturbing. The images go beyond people’s experience.’

Well, you can’t argue with that (unless you move in some very funny circles). The manimals are from Lee’s personal portfolio of work and occupy that hinterland between photography and art. `They aren’t drawings, they aren’t paintings and they aren’t photographs, they are something entirely different created on the computer,’ says Lee. The images have undoubtedly triggered more than one debate about the validity of computer art as a whole new genre. Significant;y, and much to Lee’s delight, the Brooklyn Museum of Art has just taken the image shown on our front cover this month,depicting a Chinese person with the facial characteristics of a leopard.

Whatever your stance on the, ‘but is it art?’ front, the images also have more than a passing interest and relevance to the commercial creative world. For even if you find them hideous grotesque, repulsive or too bizarre for words, you have to admit that they represent a lovely piece of electronic retouching, executed not on a high end system, but at the desktop by Lee himself, using Adobe Photoshop software running on his Macintosh Quadra 950.

Like many, we jumped to the conclusion that Lee scans in shots of the human and the animal, and then uses Photoshop to refine the photocomposition. Such an assumption does him a great injustice however. Lee actually draws and paints in the features of the animal onto the human face using Photoshop’s brushes and tools. ‘You couldn’t do it just by scanning in an image of an animal’s face,’ says Lee. ‘For instance, take the face of a snake, it is so much flatter than a human’s. It just wouldn’t work to superimpose one on the other. I have to rescale and distort each of the features to ensure it looks realistic.’

Many Chinese people believe that men and women exhibit characteristics of the animals to the year they were born. ‘I often observe people who have particular animal traits. But when I do the images, it is important that they appear more human that animal.’ Part of the reason for this is because the images are more a comment on human behavior than the animal’s.

The images shown in this article are from a more recent work called Judgment, which takes inspiration from the Chinese Circle of Reincarnation. Including Man, there are 108 different creatures in the circle, and Buddhists say that each one will be judged in a mythological court under the earth after their death. In Lee’s court, judge and jury are based on Chinese mythological figures, heroes and spirits.

All the portraits were photographed with a 4X5 camera and then scanned into Photoshop. Lee has his animal reference beside him while he is creating the figures. He shies away from letting you dissect the images too clinically, preferring that they retain their mystique. However, you can probably identify which animal features in most: on the opening spread (pages 10-11) the man takes the features of a pig, and the woman, those of a snake...