Archival ink on luster paper, 50”x 50”
Zenpical Texture is a series of sixteen photos that explores the possibilities of cultural collision and integration. In an increasingly complex international situation, we are constantly challenged to hold an open and healthy attitude towards a multi-cultural environment. Especially when cultural differentiations develop into cultural exclusions, it becomes a big question that how we are going to live and thrive with “different” others.
This project is based on an analogy between nature and culture. All the photos were shoot in Miami, FL, where tropical scenery lives along with passionate Latin culture. Plants, animals, and landscapes in Miami were generally depicted as bright, colorful, and energetic. As an artist from far East, however, I choose to express these western properties in an Eastern way. With low lightness, cold tones, natural colors, and amplified details, this group of photos is intended to merge tropical texture with Zen style. It induces the mediation between light and shadow, part and whole, dynamic and static, uniformity and inconformity, which would hopefully arouse a sense of Zhongyong (a doctrine of the mean created and promoted by Chinese Philosopher Confucius, encouraging a dialectical thinking and living style) in people’s minds. Meanwhile, I display these photos in forms of geometrical symmetry, with circles centered in squares, and squares further composes various larger squares. It represents order, wholeness, invariance yet transformation and differentiation. The concept of symmetry is not only a very important spiritual philosophy in Eastern culture, but it also sheds lights on opportunities of harmonious chaos or chaotic harmony in a multi-cultural sense.
SIYAO LYU 