To be able to be Light-retaining

作品賞析

In Can It Retain Light?, several rays of fluorescent green light crisscross through the bushes of a hedge, seeming to bring energy to the thin, dense leaves, while what appear to be dried-up leaves seem to be trying to absorb nutrients from the light beams, too. When the artist Liang Yu-Ning was studying in France, he liked to go jogging in the park opposite his rental house. He painted the park’s bushes, which were always pruned into square shapes. He liked to observe how the bushes changed through the four seasons, from green in spring to orange in autumn, from lush in summer to bare in winter—such a huge gap that it made it impossible to judge whether they were dead or just accumulating energy. He thought about the plants’ survival mechanisms, imagining that they might still be absorbing energy through light, converting energy in a way invisible to the naked eye, and waiting for the start of another growth cycle.