Moments in Light presents Kong Siden’s first solo exhibition, introducing a new series of digital works, including a lightbox, video projections, and video installations. Through digital technology, the artist compresses and transforms hundreds of photographs and videos he took between 2018 and 2023 of changing urbanscapes and landscapes of Cambodia into collages of experiential illuminated colors and textures.
Upon entering the gallery space, visitors are welcomed with a lightbox also titled Moments in Light. At its center, a silhouette form of a tree appears over a large circle. At close observation, layers and layers of recognizable mini pictures of natural and built environments superimpose each other with distorted colors. The central circular form and the rotated images on the top suggest a circular and upside-down relationship between nature and human-built structures.
On the other side, Phantasm, a pile of sand covered with shattered pieces of glass and mirror, reflects a video projection from the ceiling, producing scattered light shapes across the walls and the room’s ceiling. Siden’s photographs and videos of his memories of places are no longer discernable here. They become light fragments joined together through a circular force but only disperse at their own reflection. While the objects remain still, the video continuously changes and revolves, creating a bodily experience within a kaleidoscope.
Motion and transformation, both physical and perceptual, are highly felt in Siden’s works. Next to Phantasm is another work titled Gleam Light, which takes the form of a disk of projected video floating in space. An apparent everchanging-colored planetary object or microscopic organism delicately spins and morphs along with the rhythm of an electronic sound. A sense of a macro- and a micro-universe collide as the image continuously mutates like moving painting.
While many works in the show invite observation and contemplation, a huge projection at the end of the gallery hall, Light in the Wilderness, welcomes the audience’s immersion into the work. The video starts with an image reminiscent of the lightbox work, then gradually disintegrates. Here, visitors’ bodies become images and collage with the projection into dancing pixels.
In Moments in Light exhibition, Siden introduces a large body of work synthesized from his pictural memories of Cambodian urbanscapes and landscapes. Playfully employing digital technology, the work dives into an interface between reality and illusion, motion and stillness, and visual perception and bodily experience. Time and space of the natural and the human-made from the artist’s memory images condense into a light liquid of meditative moments, questioning their integration and disintegration.
Text by Vuth Lyno
