Soo Sunny Park的装置作品Unwoven Light使Rice画廊的广阔空间充满活力，将其转化为一个充满光、影和绚丽色彩的闪烁世界。37个独立的雕塑单元悬挂在墙壁和天花板上，形成优雅、扭曲的抽象形式。进入画廊没有固定的路径可循。相反，我们被邀请慢慢地漫步，就像一个人沿着河边散步一样，停下来欣赏在水面上跳舞的闪烁的光。
《Unwoven Light》继续了Park对光的短暂性的实验，以及光如何影响我们对建筑空间的感知。2012年7月，她实地参观了画廊，开始思考她的装置，体验空间的建筑和自然元素:它的比例和表面，尤其是它的照明条件。光虽然是非物质的，但在她的每一个作品中都是一个关键的结构元素。在这里，她利用了画廊的照明和通过前玻璃墙进入的自然光。Park说:“我们在看东西的时候并没有注意到光，而是注意到光让我们看到的东西。Unwoven Light捕捉光线，并通过装置表面、画廊地板和墙壁上的彩色反射和折射，使其显现出来。”
一天，Soo Sunny Park看到一个粘在篱笆上的泡沫塑料杯，就想到了链条的刚性和多孔性，既能充当边界，又能保持开放的外观。她通过拉紧、弯曲、焊接每个角来塑造链环的每个部分，使其固定在适当的位置。这个形状的单元成为了一个建筑组件，她可能会使用不止一次，并将其回收到新的装置中。对于Unwoven Light, Park使用了之前装置中的20个雕塑单元，并建造了17个新的雕塑单元。Park在新罕布什尔州的工作室里和两名助手长时间工作，花了两周时间完成了一个单元。每一块都需要7个小时的焊接来支撑围栏，100个小时的绑线来固定每一块有机玻璃，还有更多的时间来切割有机玻璃的形状以适应链条单元。
链条围栏的结构类似于织布机上水平和垂直排列的纤维网格。然而，Park将网格结构作为一种“解开”的手段。连接到每个开放单元的链环是一个切割形状的彩虹树脂玻璃。在自然界中，孔雀羽毛、鱼鳞和蝴蝶翅膀的光泽中都可以看到彩虹色，它们呈现出无数种颜色，随着观察角度的不同而变化。在这里，涂覆树脂玻璃的虹彩特性有助于解开光线，每个形状在光线的存在下从透明变成彩色。Park解释说:“就像一张网，雕塑是一个过滤器，旨在捕捉已经存在的光，并迫使它显示自己。现在我们可以看到它，光，在紫色的阴影和黄绿色的反射中，都反映了栅栏的形状，并重构了它们居住的空间。”
每位参观者对《Unwoven Light》的体验都将是独一无二的，这取决于一天中的时间、自然光与人造光的比例、观看的精确角度，甚至是画廊里的人数。两个人站在一起，每个人对光的动态存在有完全不同的体验，这是可能的。
我们感谢莱斯大学美术馆实习生Greta Shwachman (Rice '15)采访了这位艺术家并撰写了本文的初稿。
Soo Sunny Park's installation Unwoven Light animates Rice Gallery's expansive space, transforming it into a shimmering world of light, shadow, and brilliant color. Suspended from the walls and ceiling, thirty-seven individually sculpted units are arranged as a graceful, twisting flow of abstract form. Entering the gallery there is no set path to follow. Instead, we are invited to meander slowly as one might stroll along a river’s edge, stopping to admire the glints of light that dance on the water’s surface.
Unwoven Light continues Park's ongoing experimentation with the ephemeral qualities of light and how light affects our perceptions of architectural space. She began thinking about her installation by making a site visit to the gallery in July 2012, to experience the built and the natural elements of the space: its proportions and surfaces, and in particular its lighting conditions. Though immaterial, light is a critical structural element in each of Park's works. Here she has utilized both the gallery’s lighting and the natural light that enters through the front glass wall. Park notes, “We don’t notice light when looking so much as we notice the things light allows us to see. Unwoven Light captures light and causes it to reveal itself, through colorful reflections and refractions on the installation’s surfaces and on the gallery floor and walls.”
Seeing a Styrofoam cup stuck on a fence one day got Park thinking about the chain link’s properties of being both rigid and porous, of acting as a boundary while retaining an appearance of openness. She shapes each section of chain link by holding it in tension, bending it, and then welding each corner to hold the form in place. The shaped unit becomes a building component that she may use more than once, recycling it into new installations. For Unwoven Light, Park used twenty sculptural units from a previous installation and built seventeen new ones. Working long days with two assistants in her New Hampshire studio, it took Park two weeks to complete one unit. Each required seven hours of welding to brace the fencing, one-hundred hours of tying the wire that holds each Plexiglas piece in place, and many more hours of cutting Plexiglas shapes to fit the chain link cells.
The structure of chain link fencing is similar to the grid of fibers arranged horizontally and vertically on a weaving loom. However, Park uses the grid structure as a means to “unweave.” Wired into each open cell of the chain link is a cut-out shape of iridescent Plexiglas. Iridescence in nature is seen in the sheen of peacock feathers, fish scales, and butterfly wings, appearing as a myriad of colors that appear to change with the angle at which they are viewed. Here the iridescent properties of the coated Plexiglas serve to unweave light, each shape turning from clear to colorful in light’s presence. Park explains, “Like a net, the sculpture is a filter that is meant to capture the light that is already there and force it to reveal itself. Now we can see it, the light, in purple shadows and yellow-green reflections that both mirror the shape of the fence and restructure the space they inhabit.
Each visitor's experience of Unwoven Light will be unique, depending upon the time of day, ratio of natural to artificial light, precise angle of viewing, and even the number of people in the gallery. It is possible for two people to stand next to one another and each have a completely different experience of the dynamic presence of light.
We thank Rice University Art Gallery intern Greta Shwachman (Rice '15) for interviewing the artist and writing the first draft of this text.
