⋄ Music Film
⋄ Artist Statement
⋄ Photography
⋄ Installation
⋄ Credits
⋄ Creative Process
⋄ About Me
Artist Statement
This is almost equivalent to the very meaning of my existence. Crystalline Layer is the practice of embodying this meaning. I cannot resist the impulse to throw my body into this beautiful planet—the urge to take part in the landscapes constructed and transformed by deep time. Just as I have written in films and journals.“By the time long before actually reached a snow mountain, I had long been surrounded by dreams and visions imbued with crystalline clarity. It was as if I had already physically arrived there, even though I had never been.”
As an ongoing long-term project, Crystalline Layer borrows the imaginative resonance of a geological term to describe my understanding of myself, of beings, and of the environment. It aims to explore the flow and balance inherent in the elements and material structures—born of the cosmos—that constitute all living beings on Earth: the entanglement of life with its environment, the enduring vitality that stretches among substances, and the perspectives of transformation, diversity, and hope embedded within. As I tracing the rise and subsidence of geological layers and the mutual gazing, listening, touching, and depicting among living beings. Birds lead me—to learn the language of water, to grow familiar with the words of mountains. Crystals appear everywhere, serving as the medium of formation and transformation for all things.
Yes, I want to tell you many stories, stories without end, as they will flow throughout the entirety of my existence as a human. When I become a cloud, a bird in flight, a speck of dust, or another form of life, perhaps I will narrate these stories with newly acquired languages.
The music film All Those Convergences That Rise and Settle represents a condensation of my journey spanning the Eurasian continent through these years. When my body and spirit immerse themselves within these landscapes, my understanding and dialogue with Earth's mother tongue spontaneously transform into natural chants and dances. Each time when I gently touch these rocks of various hues and types, the stories hidden among geological strata unfold gradually before me, resembling the flourishing life that spreads across the mountains.
I cannot help but always recall my childhood, when I first saw the fossil of an Archaeopteryx and the deep impression it left on my memory.
I would never have expected that, in the years to come, seagulls would ride the wind around me as I sat alone on the edge of a cliff; that a parrot would lick the tears rolling down my cheeks; that sparrows, bringing vitality to the withered trees of winter, would also plant within me a new understanding of the snowy plains—a joy that allowing the courage to hope and reassurance to rise again from this barren land… Perhaps what I mean to say is that at times I truly feel like those birds, keenly attuned, following the monsoons, ocean currents, and shifts of climate, shuttling through the Earth as a whole, from the sea floor to the mountain peak. And in the dreams where I dwell in happiness, they are always dreams of flight. This bond between me and the birds has led me to begin assembling my wings out of minerals in which star maps seem to have solidified. As ancient beings carried forward from the age of dinosaurs, I long to join them and become a link in these bridges of memory.
Artistic creation, for me, is both a way to record my encounters with these lives and wonders, and a vessel to share the true miracles of the world with others. Often, I ponder: what traces will we leave when we enter the geological layer known as the Anthropocene? When future lives peek into the past, will they be able to see the gentle entanglements that existed between former species? Living alongside species that survived the fifth extinction, can we respond beyond critique or sorrow when faced with the potential ongoing catastrophes and extinction? In this era when a piece of software can so effortlessly produce an image that appears incredible, do we still remember the power of imagination preserved within our evolutionary genes, and the true miracles that exist in reality?
Throughout long journeys of wandering and following traces, I increasingly sense images born from the light of 10²⁴ stars active in a life's language. Even within substances named by humans as inorganic, I perceive flourishing life. The vitality in the metal makes it bloom into flowers; maple leaves fallen to the ground transform into birds, much like the existence of leaf butterflies. I believe that it is through imagination that organisms have become the diverse species we are today, scattered across every corner of this planet. This is the beginning of evolution.
In the final presentation, I try to construct a multi-sensory space like a habitat, inviting people to perceive the freedom of existing within vastness and our own serene presence as a part of it. The film has become an eternal path, one that can be journeyed along countless times through observation and imagination, while they, in the years beyond my sight, will continue to live freely and ceaselessly.
In the end, I sincerely hope to keep walking forward. I hope to carry with me the subsequent chapters of Crystalline Strata, and to participate in real actions for the protection of glaciers, species habitats, and ecological diversity. My gratitude goes to Be Still Media for offering me this chance to look back and to share. What might happen in a moment when there is enough room for change and evolution? Perhaps that is the very scene when a new geological epoch emerges.
Iceylithe Bintong Wang