Un voyage sans fin au-delà du présent
Chih-Chien Wang
Panama Station
Artist: Chih-Chien Wang
Chih-Chien Wang is a Taiwanese artist who has been living in Montréal since 2002. His work explores the poetry of everyday experience and showcases ordinary moments in life that reflect his understanding of the people, the society and the space with which he coexists. His images evoke a fragility in things, an archaeology of the present moment, in which Wang questions life and death.
About the artwork
Chih-Chien Wang is very familiar with the neighbourhood around the Panama station. He visits it regularly and views it as a journey through the various dialects, cultures and culinary specialties. It is like a physical and metaphorical portal allowing him to navigate time and the seasons.
To pay homage to this site that is so particular, Wang dove into his own aerial photographs taken when he was returning to Montréal from plane trips. He added photographs of dust particles flying in the wind, taken in his Montréal studio.
Un voyage sans fin au-delà du présent overlays three layers of images, creating large cloud formations moving across different skies.
- The first layer is made of pixelated clouds.
- The second layer gathers eight different perspectives towering over the earth and sky.
- The third is an image of dust particles that turn into stars when the sunlight hits them as they float about a room.
The open and luminous composition guides your eye from the infinitely small to the infinitely large, from familiar territory to the whole universe, from the lasting to the ephemeral—like the dust, light and clouds in the artist’s lens.
The images in this art installation create a cinematic point of view, transforming the space in the Panama station access tunnel.
“When we are travelling, we ask ourselves where we are heading and what we have left behind. Are we going toward a job, a school or a friend? Are we going toward a future where the past gradually transforms into an opaque presence where only a bright light can open a portal that penetrates into another space-time reality?”
