Video, Ceramic
3/2024

One day, while wandering along the river on my campus, I noticed a balloon suspended in the water beneath a small waterfall. Despite the force of the flow, it remained almost perfectly still. I wondered: How could the balloon resist such impact? Why did this motionless image emerge within such turbulence? This moment of visual and cognitive contradiction sparked my curiosity about the Coanda effect and became the point of departure for Red Balloon.

The work is inspired by this natural yet almost magical phenomenon—the Coanda effect—where an object is stably “held” within a flowing medium, appearing simultaneously in motion and at rest. This paradox of relative movement and absolute stillness led me to record a series of related videos, echoing the philosophical idea that one can never step into the same river twice. By projecting these moving images onto a ceramic surface, the piece investigates how time and space intertwine across different material conditions. The treadmill, hair dryer, toilet, and river are not the true subjects of the work; rather, they function as conduits through which the flow of time becomes perceptible, collectively revealing that change itself can sometimes be a constant. In this sense, change becomes the only thing that does not change—change becomes the eternal.

The ephemeral light of projection contrasts sharply with the material permanence of ceramics. Light mediates this tension between the fleeting and the enduring—much like the dualities embedded in human relationships and social transformation. By casting moving images onto solid forms, the work creates a kind of “spatial montage,” layering temporal and material narratives to stage a dialogue between past and present, stability and flux. The interplay between tactile materiality and conceptual inquiry reflects my interest in situating projection art within broader cultural and philosophical contexts, drawing on media archaeology to reveal how technological mediation reshapes our experience of time, matter, and change.