Artwork Appreciation
For artist Tsai Ling-Chu, photography, as an art form of visual representation, is a process of communicating with the world and a tool for expressing the creative artist’s heart. Emotions that cannot be put into words are expressed through images, and feelings such as loneliness can still be shared with the world.
The idea of the work Silent Light (the Chinese title actually means Floating Light) came from inadvertently seeing a stool with a missing corner, and inspired her to think about the stool’s “past and future”: this stool must have been intact in the past, and before that it was a piece of wood. Later on, will it be burned as firewood? The nine individual photographs are arranged in a 3x3 square. The faint changes in the wall in the background symbolize the shifting of time, and the objects placed on the stool symbolize the various aspects of life. Tsai uses this stool to bring out the theme of change and impermanence, and that people are constantly searching for themselves, looking forward to the day when they truly understand themselves.