There is a glowing sea floating in the air. It moves with the people, spreading everywhere, and getting more and more clear. -- by the artist, 2011.

About the Work

The passing of a friend inspired this piece. I tried to take a self-description from the past as the text, and then to develop a moving mechanism installation piece. The lights formed the shape of a body that is slim and light weight. It portrays the imagination of the weightless of a soul going back to the ocean and floating within.

The concept came from a friend’s passing. It inspired me to make a piece that is memorial to this friend. I tried to write down something about after people died, a material (temporarily, I call it “soul.”) left the body: “There is a glowing sea floating in the air. It moves with the people, spreading everywhere, and getting more and more clear.” Perhaps, movies and TV shows gave me the ideas, I always imagine that the gouls are like some materials that were in our bodies since the day we were born. After we die, one after another materials flee the body that do not function anymore. Soul is part of the materials. I had a new interpretation on the thing that left the body. I imagined that it is a shape that glows dim light in the dark. When it is still in a body, perhaps one could say that it resides in the body, it is circulating in the brain, blood, muscles, pulses and even consciousness. When the home is destroyed and left it no place to live and grow, it is then released from the body along with the air circulation in the physical environment to breath in and out and to morph. The intimate material that fought for so long to survive at the end flows to a wide open place like the ocean that is weightless. The “wide open” is the same as what Baudelaire once wrote in his poem, representing a place that is peaceful and quiet.

The main creative medium is cold cathode fluorescent lamp. After a construction process, it becomes a structure suspend from the ceiling with thin silk and elastic threads. The delicate and fragile light rods formed a translucent spacial structure. It tried to reenact what the text described about how I thought of the material of soul to be slim and light. By using mechanical movements motorized by a machine, this shape starts to mimic a living organism to make breathing movement like a collected spirit.