If the Universe Allowed Time to Move Forward

作品賞析

Knowing that moving images are actually composed of one after another still image, the artist Chen Wan-Jen often explores the relationship between “movement” and “stillness” in time, or the feeling of passing time passing, through his creation of moving images. In The Universe Allows Time to Turn Clockwise, the swimmer seems to move endlessly in a clockwise direction on the display screen. Chen used an aerial camera to capture at random the swimming postures of swimmers at a beach, and then, through post-processing, formed a very poetic picture of the swimmers struggling to move forward. Many physicists in modern times have put forward various hypotheses about time, that it might not be unidirectional but diverge toward future and past at the same time, so Chen titled his work based on this idea. It takes exactly two minutes for the swimmer in this work to complete a lap, so this work can also function as a clock or hourglass.