Kou Tak-Leong builds a shadow from steel and light

Black rectangles and cloudy panels of light sit low above the floor. Their edges meet, overlap, and break away from one another. Seen close, the construction is easy to inspect: steel frames, reflective dark surfaces, pale light, seams, shallow supports.

Kou Tak-Leong's Foreseen gives a shadow its own physical parts. It is made from steel, PMMA, optical film, and LED. The organizer describes the panels' distribution, direction, and angle as traces of a vertical form that is no longer visible. The object that would ordinarily cast the shadow is absent. The shadow remains on the floor.

In the current installation photographs, the work stretches across the polished marble-patterned floor of the TS Holdings Tower lobby. A large staircase twists overhead. The rectangles below it spread in a long, irregular line, with bands of pale light cutting through black sections.

The Taishin Bank Foundation for Arts and Culture places Foreseen between two ways of knowing where a shadow will fall. In one, measuring the shadow means waiting for a body, the ground, sunlight, and a particular moment to coincide. In the other, software and data estimate the position in advance.

The foundation describes a change in method: from being present when the relation occurs to calculating it in advance. The installation turns that estimate into an object. A predicted position becomes a set of panels that can be fabricated, carried indoors, wired, and arranged on a lobby floor.

The calculation determines where the pieces belong. It does not supply the missing vertical form; that still has to be inferred from fragments on the floor.

Kou was born in Macau in 1991 and lives and works in Taipei. Project Fulfill Art Space describes his longer practice as beginning with the structures, routes, and boundaries already present at a site. Light functions in that practice as a way to measure and locate, while a room takes shape through movement, pauses, and turns.

Foreseen is on view through September 11 in the first-floor lobby of TS Holdings Tower, No. 118, Section 4, Ren'ai Road, Da'an District, Taipei. It is open Monday through Friday, 9:00–19:00, with free admission. Groups of three or more may reserve a guided visit through the Taishin Bank Foundation for Arts and Culture.