Peiyang Lan

Gateway

The ambiguity of the boundary between the subjective and the objective, the conflict between knowledge and intuition, is the subject of my project. Optical illusion is my language. An optical illusion is subjective, occupying the space between human knowledge and  intuition, between the two-dimensional plane and three-dimensional space.

I prefer to confuse boundaries rather than provide clear definitions. In this project, I would like to remind people that, in reality, things are not so clean cut. On the contrary, the boundaries between the real and unreal are often overlapping or vague.

In this work, photography plays a significant role. Photography, in addition to being an artistic genre, serves as a “recorder of reality.” However, as technology is more widely used and the circulation of pictures increases daily, how do we know that a picture is a image of the real world? How can we establish that one picture is more “real” than another?

This project incorporates photographs of origami spaces, moving from two-dimensional flat paper, to three-dimensional sculpture, and then back to the two-dimensional plane. In these images space and scale are blurred, making the real ambiguous.

The title of the work, Gateway, expresses a transformation and the unification of opposing objects, from the visible to the invisible, from reality to fiction, from awareness to subconsciousness, from negative to positive, from yin to yang...and the reverse. Through this work, I hope to obscure the viewer’s perception and remind them that things are often not as they seem to be. The apparent, certain, and tangible are not the only things that are valuable. I want to encourage others to accept things that seem useless: imagination, association, the subconscious, and dreams.