Trash Can

 Trash Can is a hybrid media video installation by artist Le Xi, markig thne earliest establishment of a spatial and topological structure within their ongoing Everyday Energy Series.

The installation consists of a fixed-angle digital projector, a physical trash can placed directly within the light beam, paper waste scattered on the floor, and the shadow cast onto the wall. The container intercepts the projection light, carving out a negative, light-deprived shadow space directly behind it.

Hand-drawn animations are projected simultaneously onto the container's physical surface and within its shadow. Bypassing literal depiction of daily experiences—food items, utensils, and transit machinery—the artist extracts their underlying structures, translating them into neutral, weightless linear vectors. This translation detaches everyday objects from their inherent functions and semantics, resolving them into a pure motion of continuous self-succession in rotation. Concurrently, vector silhouettes within the negative shadow space overlap and settle within its physical confines, sharing a unified visual field with the paper waste scattered across the floor.

Refraining from narrative or theoretical conclusion, the installation leaves the question open to the space itself: as everyday objects are reduced to raw physical volume and experience is evaporated into abstract motion, how does the viewer's gaze locate a line of sight to linger within the fissures between physical surface, projection light, and shadow.