ecstatic-suspension:

“There seemed to be some heavenly support beneath his shoulder blades that lifted his feet from the ground in ecstatic suspension, as if he secretly enjoyed the ability to fly but was walking as a compromise to convention.”

- Zelda Fitzgerald on F. Scott

Photography: Gabe Chen

Art Direction: Lu Yilin & Christina Chua

Makeup and Hair: Xara Lee

Model: Anasthasia, Upfront Models

[Flash 10 is required to watch video]

This is an extract of the first video installation I did at Slade school in 2000. I’d been collecting images of surfaces in my travels around Europe.

Eventually, I stringed them together in sequence, zooming into the image to take the audience beyond the ‘surface’. This was a rather literal expansion of the idea of “looking at the wall behind the wall” towards infinity, taken from Captain Stanhope’s analogy to the seemingly never-ending war ahead, in R.C. Sheriff’s play “Journey’s End”.

Instead of capturing the zoom on video, I chose to create the illusion simply by enlarging the image as it gradually broke down into the most basic unit - a pixel, exposing the reality behind the digital image. While this propounded the age-old argument of analog vs digital, I was more intrigued with the end images becoming semblances of the austere canvases of the colour-field painters, their flatness presenting a direct conflict to the depth of the surface and devoid of any descriptive content. 

11 years on,  it’s interesting to note that my fascination with surfaces remain, albeit from a very different angle as seen in my latest collection “Street Matter”.