Song Changae

WATER ODYSSEY: Waterroad is a work about Malacca on the Malay Peninsula. Located along the major shipping route between the Indian Ocean and Asia-Pacific, Malacca is one of the leading port cities where different cultures and ideologies are hybridized. The artwork draws attention to the Strait of Malacca as a historical space of ambivalence, hopes, aspirations in an age of naval exploration and the long trade history through the strait connecting people’s lives and cross-pollinating cultures. The interactive media art Drawing Water Flowers features the Leap Motion sensor, real-time image generation programs, and projection mapping. When an audience waves a hand (a sensor) towards the floating moon, a contour line drawing is generated and transformed into the water flower seeds, an image combined with a pre-programmed leaf drawing by the artist. The artist metaphorically relates this process to an act that illuminates one’s self-reflection. With the water flower seeds that have fallen into the chaotic sea, the audience explores the journey of life along their own waterroads. The artist depicts a waterroads that traversing East and West, past, present, and future, revealing life’s dynamic and archetypal properties. Through the aesthetic experience of visualized undulations, the artist invites the audience to reflect upon the self, the archetypes of being, and the organic interaction of being.

Song Changae’s past decade of artistic and painterly practice has been focused on the theme of water. Based on her WATERSCAPE series of paintings visualizing the feelings conveyed by water, WATER ODYSSEY was another work that sought to combine multiple media and genres to expand artistic borders and pursue co-evolution with the spirituality of life and the universe. Through her exploration into the essence of painting and her attempt to harmoniously fuse digital technology and media, she seeks new venues of artistic expression and communication. Upon the blurred and ambiguous boundary between the digital, material and immaterial, the artist unfolds a synesthetic aesthetic world that visualizes water, the fundamental form nature’s existence.

Technical collaborator Floworks Inc. and Lee Changju
Sound director Wonil