text by Hung Su-Chen
‘Oh dear! Oh dear! I shall be late! ….’
- from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.
Even more than the Rabbit that Lewis Carroll described well over a century ago, we are all in a hurry. We count minutes from one task to another; we rush from place to place; we pride ourselves on our ability to multi-task. It is as if the means by which we navigate our lives has become its meaning. We are addicted to speed itself.
Living in this high-tech, commerce-driven world, we have lost sight and sound of ourselves. We don’t hear our footsteps or see the rise and fall of our breathing. We no longer have time to feel our own hearts beating.
I began this project by asking friends to articulate their experience of how we perceive the passage of time and discovered the obvious. We only know time in retrospect, when it has already passed us by. We don’t perceive it in the moment, watching it flow in front of us, second by second.
I work with light, time, space, sound, movement and stillness. The nuance of movement and the passage of time are always my concern. In this installation, I use light, sound, and movement to enable the viewers to focus on the tangible experience of time passing, tick by inexorable tick.
Installation:
The Gallery E at the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Art is light tight.
Four columns are installed in a square in the middle of the darkened gallery space, enclosing a 13-ft x 13-ft area.
2.2-inch diameter thick red industrial fishing rope is wound around the four columns from 3-ft off the ground to the ceiling, forming an enclosed chamber. At the middle point of the ceiling, a long pendulum is mounted. A naked light bulb, the only light source in the gallery space, is attached at the end of the pendulum. The pendulum with the light bulb sways back and forth, casting the visitors’ shadows within the chamber either back and forth or up and down depending on where they stand. The pendulum’s regular movement is synchronized with the amplified ticking sound of a clock.
The light leaks from the enclosed space through the spaces between the two ropes, casting regular long stripes of light and shadow on the floor and up the wall, then up to the ceiling. These stripes of light move rhythmically up and down, synchronized with the portentous ticking sound.
Viewers are encouraged to bend down and enter the chamber to experience more intensely how time passes, tick by tick. |
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