莊志維

Weight of the Soul

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Chuang Chih-Wei born in 1986 in Taichung, Taiwan. With a new media art mater of fine art degree from Taipei National University of the Arts and an architecture master from National Chiao Tung University, Chunang’s expertise is the interactive between light and space installation art. The works were inspired from his attention on delicate life experiences. He cares about the inter-relationship between people, objects, space and environment. His background of fine art and architecture duo specialties prompted him to experiment how digital tools and technical materials could be applied on the crossover of new media art and architecture to create some possibilities of collaboration. His honors include: Kaohsiung Award of Merit, Taipei Digital Art Awards Selected work, Mercedes-Benz AVANT/GARDE DIARIES Group show. His works also were exhibited in Hong Kong, Kentong, Beijing, China.

Weight of the Soul
2012
Fluorescent Lamp、electron device、kinetic machines
400(L)x 500(W)x350(H) cm (dimension variable)
Kinetic sculpture

There is a glowing sea floating in the air. It moves with the people, spreading everywhere, and getting more and more clear.
–by the artist, 2011

The concept came from a friend’s passing. It inspired me to make a piece that is memorial to this friend. I tried to write down something about after people died, a material (temporarily, I call it “soul.”) left the body: “There is a glowing sea floating in the air. It moves with the people, spreading everywhere, and getting more and more clear.” Perhaps, movies and TV shows gave me the ideas, I always imagine that the gouls are like some materials that were in our bodies since the day we were born. After we die, one after another materials flee the body that do not function anymore. Soul is part of the materials. I had a new interpretation on the thing that left the body. I imagined that it is a shape that glows dim light in the dark. When it is still in a body, perhaps one could say that it resides in the body, it is circulating in the brain, blood, muscles, pulses and even consciousness. When the home is destroyed and left it no place to live and grow, it is then released from the body along with the air circulation in the physical environment to breath in and out and to morph. The intimate material that fought for so long to survive at the end flows to a wide open place like the ocean that is weightless. The “wide open” is the same as what Baudelaire once wrote in his poem, representing a place that is peaceful and quiet.

The main creative medium is cold cathode fluorescent lamp. After a construction process, it becomes a structure suspend from the ceiling with thin silk and elastic threads. The delicate and fragile light rods formed a translucent spacial structure. It tried to reenact what the text described about how I thought of the material of soul to be slim and light. By using mechanical movements motorized by a machine, this shape starts to mimic a living organism to make breathing movement like a collected spirit.