Living in New York City, I am constantly surrounded by all kinds of sounds: construction, transportation, people’s chatters and shouts, loud music, and those from unknown sources (to name a few examples). These sounds assemble an orchestra of eclectic outbursts and chaos, interrupting the introspective mindset. The continuous performance of the bustling cityscape gives no break to its residents.
To cope with the metropolis’ restlessness, I practiced close looking under the din of New York City. Like how one observes the small details in nature, I filter out the ostentatious scenes and look through the multilayered veins of the streets, the intricate positioning of human subjects’ forms, and how light (both natural and artificial) paints on surfaces across the city. I became entranced with documenting the seemingly insignificant in cropped compositions to discover the introspection I longed for and to showcase the city in a restful state.
In Urban Hallucination, I see past New York City’s immediate luster and enter a hallucinative space made up of light and texture: a cropped world engineered by the photographic eye to include and exclude.
The mirages created in collaboration between mundane objects and human subjects spark a conversation about the beauty and the ephemeral nature of urban intimacy, which is made cohesive by the syntax of light and color. These image fragments coagulate poetically, creating an alternative, introspective visual attitude for New York City.
