TITLE: Hyperventilation

This series seeks to explore human beings’ reaction when faced with conditions that require instinctive judgements – how man wavers between his intuition and other desires. With the application of a pinhole camera and long exposure technique, I captured the way light moves in water in image. This concretization of the light’s movement is an attempt to portray man’s different state of mind when confronted with decision-making.

Because of the nature of the two mediums, water and air, the boundary can be blurred in photographs by long exposure. In this series, it represents the back and forth wrestling between one’s “survival instinct and desire.”

In this series of works, I parallel techniques and concepts- “medium/purpose,” “long exposure/process,” "waver /thoughts;” “photograph without dominant subjects/dialectics.” The images construct a Möbius loop, a portrait of a being caught between his needs and desires, unable to break free from his own limitations.

The film is intentionally exposed to seawater, rendering the outcome of the light-sensitive film random and unstable. This results in the images having another dimension to it, just as the uniqueness of an individual can only be perceived and understood when observed by different observers.

The arrangement of the series enables the pattern of the movements of the image to be felt more acutely; the unstable, random traces left by seawater, and the almost discernable landscape, both can only be understood when put together in comparison, just as an individual can only be understood through interaction and perception with and of the outside world. If one cannot be aware of the factors that eventually lead to his decision-making, then it would not be possible to understand one’s own decisions.

Hyperventilation embodies the mental stress and symptoms manifested in people of modern day in the face of the fast-paced and rapid-changing society.

AUTHOR: LASDA TAKBANUAZ (Taiwan)