Gazing back at the light flowing out of frames, images are retained and seen again because of the light. However, what does the stream of frames exactly retain? I wish that the worlds once shining gather together again and tell the story in the world where the number of frame streamed per second has been over 24.

Right here, let us first of all concentrate on the following imagination: the images of objects are illuminated by light. These images will be recorded as memory when they arrive at human brains. The images of people and objects are seen through camera lenses. They prompt the spectators to embark on the adventure in their immanence. The visual images in the space of daily life develop themselves into a special structure and flow or even vary on the stage of great performativity. Your vision of inquiry will be more meticulous and detail-catching. The immense inner space turns out to be the prototype of the diverse new spaces encompassed in the special structure.

In The Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard mentioned that “[i]mmensity is within ourselves. It is attached to a sort of expansion of being that life curbs and caution arrests, but which starts again when we are alone. As soon as we become motionless, we are elsewhere; we are dreaming in a world that is immense. Indeed, immensity is the movement of motionless man. It is one of the dynamic characteristics of quiet daydreaming.”

When we review Chou Tung-Yen’s experience of creation, we find that his works, whether they are short films, images combined with theaters, or installations, express his desire for demonstrating an inner world that is small but complete and simultaneously turns the minimum to the maximum. By utilizing images, Chou seeks to penetrate tangible spaces and theatrical black boxes in the real world, and thereby shapes subtle and immense psychological landscapes.

Unlike most digital artists whose backgrounds are in fine arts or film arts, Chou embarked on his exploration of images and interdisciplinary possibilities by treating theater as the point of departure. Perhaps his background distinguishes his works from those of others. The frames alternately appearing in this exhibition include mirror frames of a theater, the screen frame of a movie theater, many deliberately arranged window frames, and segmented scenes of a museum. Accordingly, this exhibition presents the visual effect different from that of installations and contains the narrativity different from that of movies.

The exhibition “Lights Flowing Out of Frames” demonstrates the results of Chou’s exploration of combining theater with image over the last decade in three genres of his works, including the video installation 'Emptied Memories' that won the top prize in Interactive and New Media Design at the World Stage Design2013, three experimental short films nominated many times by international film festivals, and several pieces of image design on theater, dance, and concert that he participated after he finished his study abroad.

This is Chou Tung-Yen’s first solo exhibition. It is also a domestically rarely seen exhibition that adopts interdisciplinary image creation of performing art as the theme. We expect this exhibition to create a small but complete dimension for the recent development of multimedia theater in Taiwan.

*image (left)
The Vanishing Film, 2009
Betacam / color, 9 minutes
© Chou Tung-Yen