Eigengrau

作品賞析

The work Eigengrau is a twelve-channel video installation created by artist Chen Wan-Jen, who photographed swimmers on urban and rural coasts, captured their movement cycles, and skillfully stitched and reassembled the images. The picture on each channel shows people swimming forward in the water from a bird’s-eye perspective. Chen Wan- Jen arranged the screens into a circle, with the people in the picture swimming forward endlessly, forming a cycle with no beginning and no end, making temporality and symbolization the visual vocabulary of his creation. Through imaging technology, Chen set the water in the picture to a gray-black color, also known as “intrinsic grey” or eigengrau, which refers to the uniform gray-black color that humans see when they close their eyes. The swimmers in the image seem to be glowing alone in the endless black night sky, swimming forward continuously, giving the viewer multiple feelings of tranquility and restlessness, order and chaos.