Instead of Painting It, Add a Background to a Real Object

What a genius idea this is of Myoung Ho Lee's. Just add a huge cloth behind a tree. Then photograph it. Instant aura. It's as if the tree appears inscribed upon a two-dimensional surface like a drawing or a painting. It's a kind of inverted Magritte. Instead of painting pictures in which pictures of trees stand in front of real trees, you take a photo of a real tree in this weird, suspended, as-if state.

Adding a background is basically commenting on how for an object to exist, there must already be some other object in the vicinity. For a mark to exist, there must be ink and paper. Meaning doesn't come from nothing. It comes from interactions between marks and inscribable surfaces.

Facing us like gigantic, 1-1 scale picture postcards of themselves, the trees seem to threaten us with a clown-like artifice which I love. The fact that you know that it's a stage set, that you can see the wrinkles in the cloth, makes them all the more intense. Like watching someone in drag. You know she or he is performing. Queer trees. Genius.

HT Declan of Sydney, a genius photographer himself—thank you so much.