‘There is a negative space in everyone’s soul.’
In her acclaimed short Minus Plus Multiply, the London-based Taiwanese illustrator and filmmaker Chu-Chieh Lee mines her experiences of anxiety and self-discovery to craft a surreal animated world. Influenced by Henry Moore’s sculpture Mother and Child: Egg Form (1977), Lee’s abstract animation features a female character attempting to find respite in a series of containers as she struggles to adapt to their ever-changing boundaries. Throughout the piece, the material character of ceramics – malleable and brittle across their lifespans – becomes a metaphor for personal fragmentation and transformation. Blending eclectic animation styles with sparse, poetic narration and immersive sound design, Lee crafts an unusually evocative and sensorially rich exploration of self.
