1/30th Second Under Water

"1/30th Second under Water comprises a series of colour transparencies set in luminous lightboxes that were inserted sequentially into the raised floor of a specially constructed passageway that was located at the start of the exhibition. Thus, viewers had no choice but to pass through the narrow confines of this corridor if they wished to see the show. This meant walking across the lightboxes, an uncomfortable proposition to begin with, made more so where each of them contained an image of a figure apparently trapped in water beneath the glass surface of the lightbox itself. Being on a one-to-one scale, the illusion of people struggling for air underfoot that confronted the audience, combined with the restricted space of the construction, provoked a powerful sense of claustrophobia. It is a good example of how Wang Wei uses art to make the viewer fully aware of his or her relationship to space: those successive experiments that work with varying degrees of ‘atmospheric' pressure." (Artist's Introduction by Karen Smith)