by Elena Chow
An immersive art experience ignites all your senses. Your vision sharpens, your hearing tries to capture the most miniscule sounds, your sense of touch is more sensitive, you are fully invested in everything that surrounds you. At the hands of sophisticated artists, you let them lead you to many worlds of wonder.
Superblue “Every Wall is a Door” is a unique exhibition that provides artists with huge spaces to freely push the boundaries of scale towards what art could be.
James Turrell’s “AKHU, 2021” is a continuation of the American artist’s series of Ganzfelds, literally translating from German as “complete field”. It is a room-sized installation that plays with light and space. The ancient Egyptians believed in a form of magic power called akhu, which is closely associated with the underworld. In Turrell’s perception, akhu is the realm where the perception, the “act of seeing” a space immersed in light, changes, and evolves and the viewer enters a state in which the physical world becomes blurred and limitless. I entered the room with a group of people and as the lights dimmed, I was a bit at a loss when the walls and the floor disappeared, and even though I was firmly standing on solid ground, I felt strangely weightless. As Turrell puts it: “My work is about space and the light that inhabits it.” Turrell is recipient of several prestigious awards, including the MacArthur Foundation Fellowship and the National Medal of Arts, and his work has been exhibited in major art institutions across the world, including solo shows at MASS MoCA in Massachusetts; Guggenheim Museum in New York; the Long Museum in Shanghai; the Israel Museum in Jerusalem; the Whitney Museum in New York; among others.
The Japanese art collective teamLab presents four digital installations that are interconnected from room to room and explores the ambiguity between living and nonliving states of being, as well as our relationship to the natural world. In “Universe of Water Particles, Transcending Boundaries”, a cascade of lines of falling water particles projected on immense walls brings us to a world of water without boundaries. As visitors meet the perceived waterfall, their body becomes like rocks in a natural landscape that force the water flow to change its course. The visitors are aware that the experience is metaphoric, and yet the realism created by the installation is such that it breaks that awareness for a brief moment, like an invitation to a dream.
In “Massless Clouds Between Sculpture and Life”, teamLab delves into the theme of life. The installation consists of a giant mass of tiny white bubbles floating in midair. I was given a full body raincoat and entered the room with a group of people. As we pushed through the bubbles, we disrupted the mass, and when the mass became a formless sculpture, it naturally repaired itself. Like any living thing, it cannot go back to the original form but can turn into something else. This is the essence of the works by teamLab, their belief that everything in nature exists in a long, fragile yet miraculous, unstoppable continuity. Founded in 2001, teamLab’s work is featured in permanent collections of the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, the Borusan Contemporary Art Collection in Istanbul, the Amos Rex in Helsinki, among others.
Another surprise awaited me. Rafael Lozano Hemmer’s “Pulse”, a monumental installation that allows you to listen to every visitor’s heartbeat as 3,000 suspended light bulbs hanging down from the ceiling sparkled like stars. The artist created this installation after he and his pregnant wife went for an ultrasound scan. They were able to hear the heartbeat of twins, but Rafael wondered how he could listen to both the twins’ and his wife’s heartbeats at the same time. As I placed my hand under one of the three “pulse sensors”, I could hear my own heartbeat louder than other heartbeats while 1,000 light bulbs lit up at the same time. It was mesmerizing to hear my own heartbeat, deep, gut-vibrating pounding.
“I develop works that are incomplete and out of my control,” Rafael had said. “It’s the public who in the end completes them, through their interaction, their interpretation, their memories”. The Canadian Mexican artist works with technologies such as robotic light, digital fountains computerized surveillance, media walls and telematic networks. His works are included in Daros Collection, Zurich; Solomon Guggenheim Museum in New York; The Museum of modern Art in New York; Tate Museum in London, KZM Center for Art and Media in Germany, among many others.
Where there is creativity, there is art. Behind any form of art, there is a beating heart that creates it.
