Loss

Rational 

These images made people quiet and I wanted to make them more meditative. Humans’ hearts are blundering and uneasy. The capricious status should be calmed by highly-focused thought, reflection of the inner world, and elimination of distractions to attain the tranquility just like the bright mirror and still water, creating extraordinary functions in body and thoughts. Usually, we have too much desires and prejudice and through meditation can be calmed and recognize our own value.

Presentation

This is how it was presented. I have 4 light boxes, three of them were displaying  images and the other one was showing characters

Light Box

I designed a light box with an area of 570*570 cm and the height of 800cm to place the picture; in the middle, it’s a flume; and at the bottom, there’s three lights. Though the lights, the fish’s shadows would be capture on the pictures, just like how we take photos. The structure of light box is divided into 5 parts:

  1. straight wood case

  2. three lights at the bottom

  3. upper part of the flume where the fish lived

  4. the glass on the top and the photography luminaries on the glass

  5. the frame on the surface

Characters

I added some character projects, which are the decomposing of the sole character, but not decompose every strike of the character. I only decomposed a part of the character so that the character could still be recognized. I made the characters floating in the water. The interesting thing happened that with a slight wind or touch, they would spread and later on combine together again because of the attractive force. They formed new shapes and generated a new order after chaos. This is also my interpretation of “loss”.

Images

One night, I found the value of shadows. Under the streetlights, my shadow overlapped and gradually changed, which converted the concrete human shape into abstract and exaggerated geometric figures. Therefore, I decided to use shadows to express the “loss” by applying the repetition, overlap, change, blur and clearance of my shadows which revealed the emotional status to convey my feelings to the audience.

Doubled shadows

Suddenly, I thought of the goldfish. There are eight treasures in Buddhism; goldfish is one of them. As the legend goes, Buddha put the goldfish into the water, meaning liberation.

I customized a glass flume, put the fish into the flume, made three lights shining below the flume, and then put spread the paper on the water to observe the changes of the fish’s shadows.

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The Shadow

In the studio, these were the setup I used to create the image sequences. I used a semitransparent gauze to cover the anterior body and make three lights shining behind the body so that there would be three shadows overlapping on the gauze. Through the semitransparent gauze, we could see the contour of the body, which made the shadow combined with the real body. Finally, I realized that my work not only consisted with my feeling of “loss” but also contained some kind of meditation philosophy.