HKWALLS is a non-profit arts organization focused on creating opportunities for Hong Kong and international artists working in the realms of street art, graffiti, and muralism.
Tobias Klein’s Liquid Light was exhibited in HKWalls: Street Art Festival 2016.
Based on simple chemical reactions of photochromic pigments with UV Laser Light, the installation literally draws continuously onto the Urban canvas. The project is split into three canvases that are drawn upon at the same time with three simultaneous working machines. Two are permanently marked by the laser, while the third one consists of two layers of one fading and one permanent layer of photochromic chemicals. The half-life of the fading pigments agitation is around 2 minutes, only to be replaced with a further animation layer. The second layer is permanent and becomes a reference to the first. Each line, drawn with the precision of a surgical knife fades slowly away while the set-up continuously repeats the drawing onto the canvas. A camera is recording the drawing processes, revealing the animated drawing, created by the repetition of a palimpsest-like layered chemical reaction. Just as the fading and disappearance of Graffiti is part of the medium that it gets overwritten and replaced, Liquid Light is a continuous fading process that through time-lapse and camera filming allows this temporal argument to be part of the Graffiti.
The exhibition opened from March 16th to April 3rd, 2016, in Sham Shui Po.