ARTIST Jason Wee spent his recent holiday in New York poring over dusty maps in libraries and second-hand bookshops, instead of enjoying the city's autumnal sights.

The 29-year-old is working on a project commissioned by the Australia High Commission to recreate Admiral Cheng Ho's voyage to northern Australia in the 15th century.

The project is a natural extension of the photographer's recent obsession with maps and myths. He is currently showing a series of 12 digital images of Japan, titled Captain's Log, at Kay Ngee Tan Architects Gallery until Dec 8.

The exhibition is his first here since he took part in the inaugural Singapore Biennale last year. He presented a multi-media installation titled 1987, which juxtaposed his great-grandmother's death with the detainment of 22 alleged Marxist conspirators.

He says he began reading maps in earnest about four years ago, after chancing upon late theatre doyen Kuo Pao Kun's script, Descendants Of The Eunuch Admiral, a part fiction, part fact play about Admiral Cheng.

Wee says: 'Maps convey less information about spaces than they do about symbols. The old maps say a lot about the world view of the day.

'There are many ancient European maps where people are drawn with faces in their bellies or with only one leg, in depictions of civilisations outside Europe.'

He says he began transforming maps into three-dimensional terrains on his computer in a bid to question the geographical accuracy of such maps and to probe the idea of memory and place.

He says: 'Maps of that time were about knowledge as much as they were about the limits of knowledge.'

One of his early efforts in April this year took him 3 1/2 weeks and his laptop was out of commission for all other functions, including playing music and checking e-mail, during that time.

He says with a laugh: 'The difficult bit was composing the landscape and determining the quality of light and water. You start understanding that clouds have multiple layers.'

Asked if his digital images are still considered photographs, he says: 'I'm playing with the idea of what's photography. People are so used to photographs nowadays and are still holding on to the myth that art photography is about detail and black and white prints.

'I see photography as the relationship between the eye and the object, between the eye and the external reality, and that doesn't need to involve a camera.'

Captain's Log - A Photographic Exhibition is on at Kay Ngee Tan Architects Gallery at 16 and 17 Duxton Hill from today until Dec 8. Opening hours are Tuesdays to Fridays, 11am to 7pm, and Saturdays, 11am to 6pm (by appointment). Admission is free.