Art Review: Floating Dream — An Immersive Multisensory Art Experience

According to “hyper-dimensional and multi-sensory” artist Lin Xinye, this art exhibit called Floating dream was initially inspired by the “radically” famous yet also ambiguous story, “庄周晓梦迷蝴蝶”.

The Daoist philosopher Zhuangzi, once dreamed of himself as a butterfly completely unaware of him being Zhuangzi, upon waking up from the dream, or rather, in this liminal space between dream and reality, he is no longer sure, if he is the butterfly dreaming of being Zhuangzi in life or Zhuangzi dreaming of being the butterfly in dream.

There are multiple interpretations to this story, some focusing on the escapism and even nihilism elements in Taoism, some focusing on the Buddhist teaching (Dogen) about impermanence and illusory nature of all things. Some focusing on identity and agency.

Juxtaposing different interpretations, you can find the contrasting brightness of hope and darkness of pessimism, and also many shades of gray in between.

These were readily incorporated in the overall visual in Floating Dream. Uniquely interesting to me, is the unexpected. That the brightnesses are encaged, but the darknesses are expanding. At one point, I found myself swallowed by the nightmare-ish black negative space, ascended by the intense Gu Zheng 古筝 rapid firing.

Xinye explained the contemporary interpretation she had also is her experience trapped in her small apartment in NYC, during the pandemic. As we can all recall, this is the period, when time becomes lucid, and reality becomes distorted by the emotional intensity and isolation induced loneliness.

Talking to Xinye after the show, I asked her about the particular visual choice of the cage. She surprised me again, by explaining that the cage is not a cage, but a hyper dimensional mulit-verse, inspired by Sci-Fi movies and books. Each cell/ball inside this structure was a living organism, with an encrypted way of communication. With her experience designing and studying monarch butterflies, she also incorporates the visual pattern of butterfly wings under microscope. Where you can see also not only the pattern contain multitude, but also there seems to be some kind of secret language encoded in them.

Ending with a hopeful note, she said, the dreams are dying in many ways, the earth is dying, cities are dying, and artists have the responsibility to just “do something”.