Composition in White (Painting)
The Breathe Residency
501 Artspace Gallery,
Chongqing, China, 2012.
501 Artspace is housed in a former munitions factory within Chongqing, the world’s largest municipality, with a population of around 30 million. The gallery exists between two worlds: an outdated, romanticised vision of ancient China and the reality of a rapidly expanding 21st-century urban sprawl. Entered from a bustling main road, the space feels immersed in the city, yet small, high windows at the rear open onto an unseen garden filled with birdsong and light.
As a working gallery in contemporary China, these windows are routinely covered by vinyl and canvas blinds designed to block out daylight and sound. Through repeated visits at different times of day and night, I became increasingly aware of my desire to draw attention to the windows and the light they admitted, to “draw” the light back into the space, much as I would pull oil paint across a canvas.
The Breathe Residency
501 Artspace Gallery,
Chongqing, China, 2012.
501 Artspace is housed in a former munitions factory within Chongqing, the world’s largest municipality, with a population of around 30 million. The gallery exists between two worlds: an outdated, romanticised vision of ancient China and the reality of a rapidly expanding 21st-century urban sprawl. Entered from a bustling main road, the space feels immersed in the city, yet small, high windows at the rear open onto an unseen garden filled with birdsong and light.
As a working gallery in contemporary China, these windows are routinely covered by vinyl and canvas blinds designed to block out daylight and sound. Through repeated visits at different times of day and night, I became increasingly aware of my desire to draw attention to the windows and the light they admitted, to “draw” the light back into the space, much as I would pull oil paint across a canvas.
When uncovered, the windows introduced shifting atmospheres as the weather changed. One element remained constant during daylight hours: the angle of ambient light cast across the walls and floor, disappearing only after dark. These shafts of light became my focus. Rather than excluding them, I wanted to reveal their value.
By aligning the blinds with the angle of the ambient glow, they could draw the light into the space rather than block it out. From this point, my thinking narrowed to what was already present: the space, the windows, the light, and the blinds.This led to the removal of the original blinds and the construction of new ones, anchored to echo and follow the line of the ambient light as it entered the gallery. In doing so, the light was fixed in place, frozen into six brushstrokes of solid illumination across the canvas of the gallery itself. By working only with existing elements, the installation reframes light not as something to be controlled, but as a material in its own right. The gallery becomes a canvas, the blinds become brushstrokes, and a transient atmospheric condition is briefly held in place.
In the end, the installation operates as a negotiation between transience and fixity, transforming an ephemeral atmospheric condition into a momentarily stabilised presence within the gallery. By reconfiguring the blinds to register and hold the trajectory of ambient light, the work foregrounds perception itself, inviting viewers to attend to the subtle and often overlooked interplay between architecture, environment, and time. In this way, the project does not impose new meaning upon the space but instead reveals and intensifies what is already present, positioning light as both medium and subject, and the gallery as a site where the fleeting can be momentarily made tangible.
By aligning the blinds with the angle of the ambient glow, they could draw the light into the space rather than block it out. From this point, my thinking narrowed to what was already present: the space, the windows, the light, and the blinds.This led to the removal of the original blinds and the construction of new ones, anchored to echo and follow the line of the ambient light as it entered the gallery. In doing so, the light was fixed in place, frozen into six brushstrokes of solid illumination across the canvas of the gallery itself. By working only with existing elements, the installation reframes light not as something to be controlled, but as a material in its own right. The gallery becomes a canvas, the blinds become brushstrokes, and a transient atmospheric condition is briefly held in place.
In the end, the installation operates as a negotiation between transience and fixity, transforming an ephemeral atmospheric condition into a momentarily stabilised presence within the gallery. By reconfiguring the blinds to register and hold the trajectory of ambient light, the work foregrounds perception itself, inviting viewers to attend to the subtle and often overlooked interplay between architecture, environment, and time. In this way, the project does not impose new meaning upon the space but instead reveals and intensifies what is already present, positioning light as both medium and subject, and the gallery as a site where the fleeting can be momentarily made tangible.