Medium: Magic box (box, mirrors, Sumi ink on mounted rice paper)
Dimensions: 120 x 180 x 23 cm
Created: 2011
What are Magic Boxes? - “Magic Boxes” are a new art form I've developed where a painting faces away from the viewer and is hidden inside a box covered on the back inside wall with mirror fragments. To see the artwork, the viewer needs to peek inside the box, & can never see the art in its entirety at once. This is designed to mimic the natural cognitive process, where an individual unites more, or less, faded memories with vibrant immediate experiences to patch together the canvas of knowledge.
The Skies of Atlantis, or Underneath the Cement, the Earth Breathes is a Magic Box imagining the skies of the mythical Atlantis, the Land of Plenty, the Earthly Paradise, on the nights immediately preceding its traceless disappearance. The nightly skies are a chaotic stream of energy, ebbing up from the abyss, still unstructured and shapeless, but starting to form and crystallize into clusters of organization that spell the impending doom of the Lost Continent.
Through a mysterious folding of space-time, the peeking viewer can see a dark shadow in the sky traversing the opening to the Magic Box. This dark shadow is a merging of two images—it traces the characteristic diamond shape of Atlantis, as depicted by ancient cartographers. However, within the diamond shape, it follows the contours of a continent yet-to-be discovered by the Western World in Antiquity—a continent that will be the New Atlantis, matching its splendor and possible doom.