Blue Long Grass

Blue Long Grass is a video installation combining animation and physical ready-mades. Originating from an observation of the relationship between botanical kinetic rhythms and synthetic forms, the work employs an unexpected visual displacement to reconsider the seemingly rigid boundaries between "the natural" and "the artificial."

Le Xi executes a "visual grafting" between a mass-produced blue toilet brush and animated long grass. Leveraging the shadowplay of their isomorphic silhouettes, the toilet brush is transformed into a botanical form swaying in the wind. An artificial shape belonging to consumer everydayness thus enters the kinetic and visual experience of a plant.

Through the spatial juxtaposition of physical object and projected light, animation ceases to be a mere screen-based image, becoming an organic component of real space. The natural and the synthetic, object and light, stillness and motion interpenetrate within this translation. The work does not attempt to erase the distinction between the organic and the man-made; rather, through sensory displacement, it ushers an ordinary manufactured object into an alternative relation of viewing: how we recognize an object, and how we ascribe meaning to it.