Video + Media

Light Chamber / new installation coming soon at San Francisco Asian Art Museum 2020.

An undulating cosmos shimmers before us like water, at first concealing the spectral image of the edge of a laptop keyboard and a pair of hands. The morphologies of the world are an amalgam of mind and matter unfolding across time and space. Ink is a metonym for an order of intensive processes that are shared across the natural world. It can function equally as an index of the embodied interior state of mind and spirit, channeling qi through its material instantiations, and recording and preserving the flows of motion even in stillness.

Branches are Roots in the Sky functions as visual exegesis of a “pre-constructed” rather than a “de-constructed” world. It presents entropic processes and emergent order in a stream of homologous imagery spanning temporal and physical scales—topological variations in still and turbulent water, the etching of river ways through a landmass, the emergent and entropic cycles of life and decay in a forest. An accompanying soundscape similarly dilates or contracts natural processes to the temporal scale of human perception.

The embodied experience of light and shadow have functioned as central metaphors throughout the history of philosophy from Shakyamuni Buddha’s “Shadow Cave” to Plato’s “Cave of Shadows.” Only Zhuangzi, however, makes the penumbra—the luminous border between light and shadow—his central image for our existence; it being at once entirely co-emergent and co-dependent on the world from which it emerges and yet entirely self-realizing and self-so within its own experiential context.