The Melting Black
by Carla Chan
A visual journey along the seashore, The Melting Black is a multi-channel video installation and a visual study of tidal movement unfolded in space.
Tidal waves are being displayed on five video monitors, each with a slight offset of distance and scale of the original scene, generating a seemingly coherent but erratic spatial and kinematic experience. The organic patterns brought forth by the changing waves against the elongated geometric forms of the video panels create dramatic contrasts that both disorient and inspire the senses. The visual presentation is further complicated by the inversion of the vertical and horizontal axes of the sea horizon, where the tidal movement is being staged and experienced from a sideway instead of frontal perspective. These spatial displacements create ambiguity that challenges our perceptual faculty but at the same time open up new dimensions for seeing movements and changes in nature that are sometimes blinded by our visual customs and perceptual habits.
CARLA CHAN
Carla Chan is a media artist from Hong Kong. She obtained her Bachelor of Arts degree from the School of Creative Media, City University of Hong Kong. Currently based in Berlin, she works with a variety of media including video installation, interactive media, virtual and augmented reality, of which the time-based medium through computational processes is vital to her practice. Much like the never-ending development of new technologies, her approach to media art challenges the conventional perception of new media interface with ever-evolving possibilities for artistic expressions.
Chan’s recent works focus on the digital representation of nature. Fusing the poetics in both nature and digital technologies, her work creates a virtual space for contemplation. Minimal in style, her works blend physical and digital elements into a hybrid form of materiality, blurring the boundaries between reality and illusion, figure and abstraction.
Chan has been exhibited regionally and internationally including the Hong Kong Museum of Art, ZKM in Germany, Asia Society Hong Kong, Art Basel Hong Kong, Frieze New York, Today Art Museum in Beijing, and more. She was also a recipient of Toy Berlin Masters Award and Young Artist Award (Media Arts) at the Hong Kong Arts Development Awards, and her works have been collected in M+ Museum and the Burger Collection in Hong Kong.
