Tina Lam

For millenia, humanity has looked to the cosmos for inspiration, spirituality, awe, mystery,and guidance. In the modern era, our cosmic ambitions have expanded to gargantuan scale, with billions invested in probing the universe’s most enigmatic phenomena. One such thing is neutrinos. Dubbed “ghost particles,” by physicists, every second, about 100 trillion of these subatomic particles pass through our bodies,nearly undetectable except by the most cutting-edge scientific instruments. Continuing my exploration of humanity’s entanglement with the unknown and the beyond-human, I began venturing into natural environments to create land-art interventions using black aluminum foil, or cinefoil, as a form of therapeutic fieldwork. Raised in urban areas by Cambodian‑Chinese refugee parents from whom I inherited a deep fear of the natural world, I now spend long hours in the woods, in direct contact with the unfamiliar, accompanied by the wind and the rushing waters as I hand‑mold cinefoil onto trees and boulders. I return to the studio with these sculptural, ghostly black shells. Through the black foil, the recognizable surfaces of trees and rocks, once grazed by sunlight, are returned to the silent darkness of the cosmos.  

Within a sterile white gallery emblematic of contemporary cultural spaces, I summon the cosmos’ descent to claim back its place. Like neutrinos, these fragments of darkness plunge gracefully through our bodies by way of the mind’s eye – 100 trillion of them every second.