Trace: An installation art project by Susie Wong

Details

Category: Arts

Published on Thursday, 23 October 2008 08:41

Written by Joe Bodia

Hits: 3052

The installation, comprising portraits, indicts the images of children, generally thought to be free from wounding or loss, with the apprehension of an impending absence.

We cannot escape from time when we consider life as a corporeal one or how we conjecture on loss and injury within our cultural psyches. Death is like time - it is the constant hum that moves alongside. "Death is hidden in the clocks" (Calvino, Six Memos).

In Chinese cultural psyche, the notion of death is dealt with through the practice of keeping ancestral portraits as part of ancestral worship: in such an instance, time is also defeated by this memorialisation.The work attempts to capture that still moment, that one split second when it stretches into eternity.

This is also when death sits between the moment of presence and absence, between the visible and the invisible. Through the act of tracing, Wong attempts to "connect the visible trace with the invisible thing, the absent thing..." (Calvino, Six Memos, 77)

{load position content_adsensecontent}