Shadow to Substance takes oriental garden architecture as a referential model for spatial perception, reflecting on how subjective experience can be reconstructed in virtual space. It aims to redefine the limits of viewing, physicality, and spatial awareness; bringing discussion about bodily experiences under modern technology. The art of landscape gardening demonstrates how natural landscapes can be shaped into ideal “man-made nature.” Its unique architectural structures, such as crossing paths and looping mazes, also partake in subverting bodily sensations of reality. This lets the viewer’s perceptions project into a simulated territory. In the philosophy of oriental gardens space and time are woven together, providing a place between reality and imagination where our mind can wander and settle into, arousing a subtle awareness along the way.
In the present age, virtuality and reality both provide ways for us to understand the world. They offer multiple possibilities for comprehending the construction of subjective perception, which gradually transforms into a continuous flow, moving away from an identifiable state. As if co-existing in physical and cyber dimensions, our perceptions are always moving, fleetingly switching from place to place.
Shadow to Substance is a dual-channel 3D video animation that immerses the viewer in a virtual garden. It consists of two screenings shown from a first-person perspective. The camera’s trajectory takes the viewer back and forth through simulated natural scenery, creating an immersive experience. This work aims to reference what lies beneath the practice of contemporary image technology and global digital mapping, exploring the various experiences that arise when one’s physical body is present in front of the work. However, one’s subjective perception of time and space is not limited to the video interface and its virtual space. In the context of this continuous dissolution between the subject, and space and time, this work embodies an Eastern view of space within contemporary virtual imaging technology. It develops the potential of these technologies to construct our inner sense of reality, and even transform our sensations into interfaces that can hold real and virtual realms; so to create a flowing dimension where the correlated subject, object, body, and space can be observed by one another.
