水言石語
Wordfall, Stonetale

Qianxun Chen & Denian Ouyang
Mixed media installation
Fade to Black, The Run Run Shaw Creative Media Centre, Hong Kong.
3–13 June 2015.

A vertical projection merges a flow of collected videos of falling water and patterned stone with Vietnamese calligraphy. This forms a landscape that uses waterfalls as a metaphor for the molding force of language.

Language shapes history and history shapes language — much like water falling over stone. On the expedition, we encountered beautiful patterns in the rock that were formed by a slow and gradual interaction. The effect was much like how language also leaves its trail through a culture – word by word, water drop by water drop. Language is to history what water is to the stones. Our interest in historical languages led us to create a ‘word fall’ that visually shows how centuries of communication act as a type of memory.