Slowly, Lightly and Quickly...

2010, video installation, color, sound, continuous loop

"A word is like a humming shell, filled with countless stories." — Gaston Bachelard

In the depths of the cave, a young woman's continuous murmur emerges. Speaking in an unfamiliar tongue, she appears to be counting something; against the rugged cave walls, a shadow of a hand repeatedly points downward, as if revealing something hidden beneath the cave floor. The woman, speaking in an ethnic minority language, uses words from her mother tongue to describe a bouncing phenomenon. While her voice and gestures seem to correspond, they remain disconnected—the counting gestures match with "adverbs" that describe various states of a ping pong ball's movement. These fragmentary words, suspended in broken context, become the very objects being counted. Language here transcends its communicative and referential functions, transforming into a pure vessel of sound. Through the superficial connection yet internal disconnection between gesture and language, the work weaves an ambiguous, disjointed narrative: as the hand's shadow in the cave repeatedly points toward what lies beyond our vision, as the woman's words detach from their semantic context, these echoes resonating in the concealed space become like ancient breaths slowly exhaled by the cave itself. The installation explores the tension between visible and invisible, meaning and sound, creating a poetic space where language dissolves into pure sonic presence and gesture becomes a ritual of pointing toward the unknowable.