‘Becoming Space of Object, Becoming Object of Space’ is a series of experimental artwork intended to explore the possibility of transformation and the interchangeable factors between these two elements, by employing the distinct characteristic of ‘blackness’ – its capacity to absorb and reunify every image of our visual perceptions. With this “absorption” and reunification of the ‘overlapped’ images, the presentation of my artwork is to look for the transcendence quality of this new formation. The juxtaposition between the conceptual reconstruction and the preconceived identification will generate a new contemplation.

Part 1: The Identification of Overlapping.

Part 2: The Quality of Night.

Part 3: The Openness of Darkness.

Part 2 - The Quality of Night

 

“With the onset of darkness, lines and colours become blurred. Objects lose their shape, the night inscribe itself on the blackest sections of the dark. Darkness is never simply the absence of light, for it is always the antagonist to light. The blackness of the dark extinguishes all action, is the place of death, is a mysterious silence that not only threatens, but also harbours the potential for becoming. Where there is no light there is the presentiment of action, a space opens up for horror and hope, and the fascination for the dark side takes root.” (Michael Scheibel, essay/ In The Light Of Appearences, book/Night On Earth, pg. 10)

 

Night brings us darkness, but we do not assume darkness as Night. Night was coined base on a fundamental shared experiences towards a particular obscure phenomenon. Night is massive; we are not able to measure her volume. She is the most influential phenomenon in this world that represents darkness. She turns colorful to blackness, spatial to obstacle. She represents a reunify world that required no distinguishes, and fill up every gaps and spaces with dense and darkness. The approaching of Night is irresistible and so does her leaving. The Night is occupying the time and space temporarily, and so does comes back eternally.

 

“The Night, the time of darkness”(Gail B. Kirkpatrick, Night On Earth).

 

She composed a routine and always-repeated memorandum that reminds us a constant and never ending programme in our daily life. We are expecting her present and we do believe she will be leaving. She is memory, sense experience, and sensation. She is a messenger.

 

The time factor of night directs our perceptions towards a more aggressive Darkness; Darkness in motion. This is absolutely different from the darkness within a room, which occupy a particular enclose space with adaptation of the switch on/off of an artificial light. It is more than a still mode, and represents a kind of dynamic and emotionally alteration both physically and psychologically. We are not able to modify the constancy of this formulated system, even though the invention of artificial/electrical light since 19^th century did contribute another living environment for work and entertainment in contemporary urban nightlife. I am not arguing the ability of new energy to conduct an artificial Day/Night atmosphere within particular circumstance, but an ever-progressing darkness that drives the momentum of our sensation.    

 

Can we assume Darkness as a tangible continuum that parallel with the idea of space* that Newton tends to describe as, cover up the cosmos physically? Therefore, can we proposed that the vagueness of the appearance is not due to the disorder of optical sensor under the lit-less circumstance, but a piece of immeasurable black veil that wrap up this material world? Is this piece of magic dark cloak that able to reunify all the sense and feature and represent to us an event of  ‘indefinable pictorial sensibility’, which is parallel to Yves Klein’s proclamation in his manifesto The Monochrome Adventure?

 

*(Space), Newton’s description of it (Principia, definition 8, scholium) as an eternal, infinite, isotropic continuum (like air, only thinner) captivates philosophers like the Siren’s song. He held that spatial relations are mind-independent and that objects stand in them not just to one another but subregions of this continuum. (Edited by Ted Honderich, The Oxford Companion to Philosophy, pg. 842)

 

Let us redraw the outline of our viewing point and have a look at another distinctive degree. If we position ourselves as astronaut who is observing this dark phenomenon at the outer space, we should be able to evaluate the shape and the size of Night as the shade of Day on Earth visually. Since we are not stay on Earth, we are not contained by Night. But the experience of such dark atmosphere will bring us to the profound meaning of this black surface in front of us, which is a black hemisphere right now. Should we consider this black outer shell as merely a black object visually or we still recognize the appearance of darkness/blackness as Night that is in conjunction with our experience?

 

The constancy of habitual life style and the practice of our continual physiological behavior suggested a valuable investigation on this empirical field, which we are able to retrace the information, recycle the datum and create a chance to reconnect the trek to a new destination. It is a formulated system that has been represented everyday/every-night, and it became part of human instinct. Instead of questioning what can we do with the Day, which is undoubtedly we even do not consider as a matter, it might be really interesting to question what Night can be. Once more, I intend to demonstrate the concept of Overlapping in part one to examine the interchangeable qualities of Night in relation to object, space and our apperception. Therefore, I am ready to further my research on the next question, ‘Am I able to materialize the Night?’ ‘Am I able to frame up a Night and represent as a sculptural/object form?’

 

“Once, in 1946, while still an adolescent, I was sign my name on the other side of the sky during a fantastic “realistico-imaginary” journey. That day, as I lay stretched upon the beach of Nice, I began to feel hatred for birds which flew back and forth across my blue sky, cloudless sky, because they tried to bore holes in my greatest and most beautiful work.” - Yves Klein, The Chelsea Hotel Manifesto (Gilbert Perlein, Yves Klein-Long Live the Immaterial, Paris: 2000, pg. 88)

 

In this manifesto, he further proclaims;

 

“Man will only be able to take possession of space through the terrifying force, the one imprinted with peace and sensibility. He will be able to conquer space – truly his greatest desire – only after having realized the impregnation of space by his own sensibility. His sensibility can even read into the memory of nature, be it of the past, of the present and the future!”

 

“It is our extra-dimension capacity for action!” 

 

His efforts to go beyond the limit of our physical sensibility and leap into the void of the spiritual adventure are provocative. He points out the pure sensibility in his monochrome series. His Immaterial status leads us to the ashes of his art, and provides a new dimension for his generation and the next generation to dematerialize the profound shared value of art in his period. And he declared Long Live the Immaterial.

 

He Demonstrate his freedom with the color impregnated in space, and celebrates the life of color that he dreamed of with painting monochrome, a pictorial matter as special material. What aroused my attention is this particular material that he uses to deliver the manifesto of Immaterial, which might provide a clue for me to explain my attempt to materialize a Night.

 

I am not able to validate the ashes of his art in his Immaterial Pictorial Sensibility Zone Series with the measurement of this material world, which the gold leaf as payment was cast into the Seine and the receipt of the ‘buyer’ was burn off end of the exchange ceremony. Perhaps I still manage to collect the ashes of his Blue Period for the validation of my Darkness; at least he did attempt to paint the blue night sky in 1957. (pic. 4) (Yves Klein, Publisher - Tate Gallery, 1974, pg.37)

 

“The single color affirms the work as entity. The form’s uniqueness induces the perception of the continuity of an enclosed space.” (Gilbert Perlein, Yves Klein-Long Live the Immaterial, Paris: 2000, pg. 14)

 

I still remember the First Night I got on my drawing paper on the Christmas Eve 2002, “He still remembers the first night, a Night, on a street in a night, it was raining, and it seems like there is a black cloud in an un-lit night. The rain is touching his face, and perhaps the drops are stirring the water surface of a lake that is not far away from him. He knew it is raining, and he knew a black cloud is delivering the rain, he can hear the rain, when the rain meet with the lake. He tries to figure out the walking distance from the lake, but he can’t get any clue in a night without any light source. “Last Night was amazing!” When he woke up next morning, he decided to make a sculpture to express the romance he got last night, the romance when he met a black cloud in a night even though he never saw her. He would not be satisfied with his writing to express his emotion or shared with his wife through words, because he is a sculptor. He is a Sculptor! When he pick up a charcoal and do some sketches on the paper, he realized that what he got from the paper is a block of blackness, he can’t see the cloud, he can’t see the rain, he can’t see the lake, and he even can’t find himself in that patch of black block. He won’t give up, as he always believes that he is the one who deliver the fantasy. Therefore, he concentrate on that patch of darkness on the paper and try to find a way to get through the darkness… and he begun to see the cloud, the rain, and the lake again. But he still can’t share with his wife about the Night. He really needs to do something.”      

 

I really need to do something! If that patch of blackness is allowing my imagination to adapt with my memory, to tell me what happened in that Night with my writing, what kind of solution for me to represent a black cloud in Night visually? And that piece of object/form should be able to imply a possible enclose space behind the blackness physically. It should be a material/idea that possesses the tangible quality of space/object that represent this “realistico-imaginary” event. I want to materialize Night!

 

When I was a teenager, I always spent my evening with the sunset on the seaside. I knew that the moment when the sun takes in her last breath, the sea is black, a visible black before turning into total darkness. The ship, the island, and even the cloud became part of the black sea, before the darkness took over every free space, and the Night was approaching.

 

The winter evening of Kelvingrove Park is spectacular. The outlines of a housing estate on the hillside begin to merge with the park, the trees, and eventually it presents to me a dramatic outline between the Night on Earth and the Night in the sky.

 

The rain of Glasgow is mischievous, the black cloud is always following me wherever I go, and I lost my shadow.

 

My cast shadow is a mysteriously reduced form that owns its outline as a black unified image to I myself. It is simply an act to compress a full-length writing note to the depiction of a title. I lost my identity.

 

I begin to construct First Night. I became aware that the black sea/black liquid is a wonderful idea/material that is capable of accepting/adapting any object. The black liquids provide me the Darkness with sensible density. The almost invisible mobilization and the ever-changing location of the floating black cloud lead my reading to my footstep inside the Darkness. (pic. 5)

 

I choose to fall into the darkness, a darkness that a black cloud preserves for her shadow. (pic. 6 & 7) I decided to conduct a magic black cloak to reunify my feature and sense. A black knitted object that cover up my whole body has presented an overlapping image within the shadow’s volume (black cloud) and the darkness’s volume (myself) three-dimensionally, it occupies the physical visual space as an object, and it present to the viewer a partially indefinable image of I myself. Can I suggest this condition as “Partially Indefinable sculptural Sensibility”? 

 

I am a darkness/shadow/myself in motion, and I become a ‘black hole’ in the viewer’s pictorial sensibility; an unperceived space/ a void which where I am. I am creating a black object/image that deliver a distorted ‘black space’ within a visible space. Therefore, I am virtually and aesthetically presenting the illusion of Becoming Space of Object, Becoming Object of Space that has been discussed in part one.

 

 I couldn’t show my wife my Night, my Cloud, my Shadow, and my Darkness with my writing, because I am a Sculptor, and because they are my sculptures. (pic. 8 & 9)

 

 

 

“My hand and feet drenched in color, then applied to the support – there I was, in the face of everything psychological in myself. I had proof of having five senses, of knowing how to work myself! Then I lost my childhood… like everyone of course (one mustn’t delude oneself), and as an adolescent, I quickly encountered nothingness. I didn’t like nothingness, and that’s how I got to know the void, the deep void, the depth of blue!” - Yves Klein (Gilbert Perlein (ed) “Yves Klein - Long Live the Immaterial”, Paris: 2000, pg. 14)

 

Part 3 - The Openness of Darkness

“The constancy hypothesis forces us to admit that the ‘normal sensations’ are already there. They must then be unperceived, and the function which reveals them, as a search light shows up objects pre-existing in the darkness, is call attention.” (Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, publisher- Rouledge Classics, Translation copyright 1958 Routledge & Kegan Paul, pg 31)