Cyber Landscape

Actually, the combination was directly inspired by the terrible derecho this August, 2020 That was the biggest storm I have experienced. Similar to many other people in Ames, I experienced a power outage due to the derecho. And I felt very inconvenient without power and internet. But the inconvenience also inspires me to think about the difference between today’s life and ancient life when there were no electronic products at all.

Based on this thought, I try to explore the combination of ancient life and contemporary life in my work.

I created a window of a traditional Chinese landscape in the middle, which represents a slow, ancient world, full of mother nature.

The ancient world is surrounded by circuit and mosaics, which represents fast, contemporary life that is full of manmade, cold, electronic products.

In addition to putting the contrasting elements together, I try to merge different elements by creating interleaving and overlapping, so that they do not conflict with each other directly.

I hope to show that these contrasting elements can co-exist in harmony.

The traditional landscape in the center of this work seems to be unreachable from today. However, compared with the cold and even broken programmed electronics in the surrounding world, the ancient world seems warm, friendly and has much vitality. This doesn’t mean that the ancient and the contemporary worlds are conflicting with each other. Instead, it means that the traditional culture and the natural world will not lose their value of existence in the new era. They will always have impact on people living in the contemporary world.