The Age of Experience

Run Run Shaw Creative Media Centre (CMC) Gallery

March 13 – Aprill  22, 2015.

The media art exhibition brings together 12 emerging and established artists, including Jeffrey Shaw, Maurice Benayoun, Jane Prophet, Don Ritter, Julian Lee Chi-chiu, Samson Young Kar-fai, Zheng Bo, Tobias Klein, Lam Miu-ling, and Tomas Laurenzo, Tobias Gremmler,  Max Hattler. The title is a request to discover these remarkable works and should remind us that art has to be first of all a discovery.

The invisible Human. In 1994 anatomists have frozen the cadaver of Joseph Paul Jernigan solid at –73°C, then cryosectioned it at 1-millimeter intervals into 1,871 slices, which were then photographed. The murderer Jernigan was executed by lethal injection and he has donated his body for scientific research.

Living cells consist of an aqueous solution inside of a cell membrane. The soft tissues of many living systems are essentially structured water. 50-75% of the human body is H2O. This high proportion of water makes crystallization within the body occur in two main ways: through dehydration when minerals crystallize from a saturated solution, and by freezing when ice crystals are formed. The formation of crystals in living cells is usually fatal.

In this project, Klein echoes some of those 1,871 slices. A human body is digitally divided using MRI scanning and turned into a template onto which crystals are grown. The body sections are given shape through the crystallization processes that echo those occurring in the body as it dies. For materialization, Klein has chosen the idea of a chandelier, reminiscent of the 15th century, ceiling-mounted light fixture hung often over the grave of the donor. In this respect, the work  becomes an ‘Organic Chandellier’ that makes the invisible body of his blood donor visible and shows us how death leads to life again. (Citation Harald Kraemer)

Curator:

Harald Kraemer