Wheelchair
Selected Frames from Wheelchair
Wheelchair is a hybrid media installation incorporating a readymade sculpture and moving images. The artwork takes as its point of departure the unique body–machine relationship embodied by the wheelchair: it is both an extension of physical mobility and a connector between body and machine, functioning like a "second skeleton." The work explores the liminal space that opens up when flesh and mechanics mutually depend upon and reshape one another.
To render this invisible "in-between" perceptually accessible, the artist renders an inherently mobile object absolutely stationary, strictly locking the physical relationships among the projector, the physical chair, and its shadow. Precisely within this paradoxical fixation, the chair's real shadow becomes a stable interface—serving as a creative threshold to access that very liminal space—along which hand-drawn digital animations organically "grow." Light and shadow become weightless, immaterial media, carving out a visible, tangible realm for an otherwise elusive body–machine dynamic.
Rather than offering a definitive resolution, Wheelchair exposes this interstitial space between body and machine, substance and moving image—inviting viewers to linger and re-examine the state of flesh and machine continuously shaping and depending upon each other.
Watch the complete work
Technical Information
Artist: Le Xi
Title: Wheelchair
Year: 2011
Medium: Hybrid media installation (readymade Wheelchair, single-channel HD video projection, digital animation, color, silent)
Duration: 1:34 min (loop)
Dimensions: Variable
Edition of 3 + 1 AP