Mirrorball: Reflections on Portraiture
Artist Focus: Kray Chen
Modelled as a Rubanoide speaker, X-ray films of the artist’s lungs are curved to create cylindrical forms that act as a membrane, also called the diaphragm. Electrical currents are used to light the work and vibrate the diaphragm, which in term generate sound. Transformed from a two-dimensional medical image into a four-dimensional speaker-sculpture, Iron Lungs renders audible and visible the added dimensionalities that emerge when the corporeal is examined materially, sonically, medically, and narratively.
The system plays 417, an album co-created by the artist and AI software and structured around the belief that 417 Hz holds restorative properties— invoking a Frankenstein-like logic in which sound and electricity becomes a life-generating force transmitted through the body itself. As the title suggests, the work examines interpassivity between the mechanical and the corporeal, identity and institutional complexes, and the unstable boundary between forces that sustain life and those that exhaust it.
@kraychen
View this work in our current exhibition, Mirrorball: Reflections on Portraiture, running until 14 March 2026.
Iron Lungs
2025
Mixed media and sound (00:25:48)
H55 x W33.5 x D22.5 cm
Image 1 and 3 by
@lavchang
#kraychen #mirrorballreflectionsonportraiture #contemporaryart #singapore #fostgallery
