SingartEnlightening Play Of Light
The way nature plays with light never ceases to be amazing. A multi-hued rainbow that crests the skies after a heavy shower are a sight to behold, especially when it is harmoniously accompanied by a marginally fainter secondary shaft of rainbow lights, with a reversal of primary colours, a slight distance away.
The beauty of that sight makes it hard to comprehend that it appears primarily as white sunlight, on entering water droplets suspended in mid air, gets its different wavelengths of differing colours by being bent at slightly varied angles. And that precision is the key for secondary rainbows to form too: light has to hit tiny raindrops at a proper angle for the minute beads of precipitation to reflect it a 2nd time: it is this double reflection that reverses the colours in the latter rainbow as well.
The solar system’s mind boggling exactness is made even more magical when we consider how the Northern Lights are fashioned: succinctly, by collisions between gaseous particles in the earth’s atmosphere with charged ones released from the 1 surrounding the sun’s. These aurora displays come in a variety of hues – pale green, pink, red, yellow, blue or even violet: the exact shade is determined by the types of gaseous elements butting heads. So ramming together oxygen molecules bursts forth pale yellowish-green dancing lights while that by nitrogen yields equally playful blue or purplish-red auroras.
I have been hard pressed to chance upon a handy work of man that comes close to what the natural does so exactly and magnificently with its illumination. That is till I came across ShanghART’s current “Intimacy: Jiang Pengyi Solo Exhibition”.
China-born and –bred, Jiang creates works of art through a deft coaxing of light; forming images on film as surreal, illusory and delicate as rainbows and the Northern Lights.
His series “Intimacy” mimics nature’s play of solar beams to a tee as he captures reflections of sunlight on fluorescent paper and photographic film by deftly applying a silver salt treatment. The results are displays of coloured formations more fluidly myriad than the diverse hues of auroras and more dynamic in shape and form than rainbows.
Yet, that is not all Jiang has in his bag of artistic tricks: his “Inconsolable Memories” is a series of polaroids that splinter the glowing rays of the sun into kaleidoscopes of crystalline patterns that seriously challenge our planet’s mastery at forming snowflakes.
While Mother Nature is dependent on the temperature and humidity of the air around the icy water droplets that have frozen onto dust particles to grow ice crystals into a multitude of different shapes, Jiang’s manipulation of sunlight in creating “Inconsolable Memories” draws inspiration from memories left by a gerontic man. He is, thus, freed from the universe’s creed of only symmetrical flakes of snow: there is artistic license to create polaroids of pristine splintered light beyond the finite number of individually different miniscule specks of shaped flurry ice.
As such, Jiang’s oeuvre encompasses a spiritual level of occurrence and tolerance as he attempts to communicate with, present and hence, absolutely understand light in relation to time, space and various mediums.
Gu Zheng, one of China’s most influential photography theorists and art critics, has named Jiang ‘The Explorer of Light’. That is an under statement: his work has renewed my view of natural wonders and brought to mind a recent news flash that has gripped the global scientific community.
Sauya Das, at the University of Lethbridge in Alberta has created a new model that no longer causes the mathematically proof of the laws of physics to break down the way the Big Bang singularity theory always did. His innovative concept holds that the Big Bang never occurred and the universe simply exists forever.
A quantum leap from Das’s theoretical formulation crystalizes this earth-shattering thought: has science finally alluded that there is a Creator?
Looking at the mirrored genius of Jiang’s creative play with all types of nature’s light, I have to say, ‘It has to be!’
Draw your own conclusions as you view the “Intimacy: Jiang Pengyi Solo Exhibition” at ShanghART, 9 Lock Road, #02-22 Gillman Barracks, Singapore 108937 before it ends on 17 May this year.
