Crowd Shadows

Crowd Shadows is a video artwork that explores the boundary between the virtual and the real through the extraction of crowd shadows. Originating from the artist's urban walks and observations of anonymity and bodily experience, the work shifts attention away from individual identity toward the overlapping shadows produced by moving crowds, sensing the invisible accumulation of different desires, movements, and social rules.

Recorded and magnified with a smartphone, the footage is transformed through screen capture, keying, and long takes, turning what was once a silent background into the visual foreground. Within this figure-ground structure, a luminous geometric form in the upper part of the image pulsates and opens and closes like a beating heart, creating a continuous tension with the dense silhouettes of the crowd moving toward the depth of the image.

Here, shadow extraction is not merely a technical process but becomes the subject of the work itself. Through the interplay of reflection, curvature, light, and movement, Crowd Shadows creates a threshold between physical reality and digital illusion. Rather than offering a fixed interpretation, the work invites viewers to attend to the unstable relationship between individual presence and collective movement, and to reconsider the fragments of experience that emerge within overlapping shadows and staggered footsteps—such as the inner tension of wanting to merge into a crowd while remaining hidden, alongside the microscopic temporal traces stretched and reconstructed on the digital screen.