Space can be acted within

20x20. Oil painting on canvas, ready to hang.

I’ve always loved superimposed images and double exposure photography. There is something so visceral about the way they embody the transience and flux of memory in time: certain things stand out to us, burrowed deep into the folds of years past and yet some impressions stand out clear as day, as real as the texture of your favourite coat, or the crisp lines of building contours. I read somewhere in a psychology textbook on sensation and perception that “objects can be acted upon, while space can be acted within.”  The book’s focus was on perceptual operations and sensory stimulus and response, but something about this sentence struck out to me, generating an automatic, abstract response in the form of a painting. An array of lights slants down in an arrow-like shape towards the children’s table and chair, a chessboard game sitting atop. I had taken a picture of this exhibition of lights at the Hong Kong Museum of Art, which flickered rhythmically to the audio of a beating heart. Some of the lanterns were shaped in flowers and hearts, suspended from the ceiling and hanging in the darkness.