invisible cities

zhixin sheng

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Invisible Cities
2024
digital collage, projectors, black cardboards and other installation materials
237cm x 314cm, 121cm x 55cm, 237cm x 380cm

Invisible Cities emerges from my fascination with spider webs discovered in an old basement and the photographs I captured of them from multiple perspectives. As I traced the webs' intricate structures—zooming in and out—their forms began to shift, conjuring poetic associations: jellyfish floating through air, microscopic life forms, star-strewn skies, and imagined landscapes. Through a process of fragmenting these photographs, composing them into collages, and experimenting with their material presence across surfaces and within space, the work becomes an homage to Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities and its meditation on the multiplicity of perception.

Layered on uneven black cardboard, the perception of the images shifts with the viewer’s movement. The work challenges the idea of spider webs as merely fragile presences in uninhabited landscapes, instead presenting them as dynamic structures that transform and reveal themselves through audience's movement and changing perspective. As audience navigate the installation, new textures surface and subtle gradations of color start to emerge, creating a kinaesthetic and visual encounter.