Artwork Appreciation
The artist Niu Jun-Qiang’s creative project, “The Borderline,” explores the complex relationship between religious belief and disease. He believes that the fear that accompanies disease and death marks the boundary of belief: when someone’s survival is on the edge, he or she often chooses to place their whole trust in belief. The Borderline-2 is a photograph inspired by thoughts on divine experience and spiritual consciousness. Niu covered a statue of Jesus with tracing paper and placed it under sunlight, so that the light would blend pure colors and soft shadows on the paper, giving it a kind of divine beauty. However, the shadow cast by the statue of Jesus seems like a devil with horns, making the photograph a fusion of light and shadow, a contrast between divinity and terror. Niu uses such philosophical visual dialectics to show the contrast between light and darkness, as well as the state of the two combined into one, in an exploration of the divine nature.