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Taken out of cultural context, one might be tempted to read Dust, Wu Chi-Tsung’s most recent exhibition at the Site Gallery in Sheffield, solely from an international art world perspective. Both of the works included in the exhibition, Dust and Crystal City present viewers with a now all too familiar international art world ‘black box’ experience. In the case of Dust (which was produced by Wu during an earlier residency at the Site Gallery), a field of intensely bright light is projected onto a wall within an almost completely darkened space, capturing, through careful use of lenses, the colourful play of fine speckles of dust within the immediate atmosphere—an image reminiscent of mappings by the Hadron Collider. Art metaphorically meets science with infinitesimally small particles moving about in what first appears to be an entirely random way, but which, on further viewing, reveals an almost graphically linear chaotic order. Trace patterns emerge and disappear, picked out in a range of muted jewel-like colours. In spite of its evidently minimal technical means, Dust is a sublimely mesmeric, indeed magical work that opens up a transcendentally indeterminate vision of our otherwise unseen surroundings.
Crystal City gives rise to somewhat different feelings. This time the work is set in a dimly lit room containing an accumulation of transparent plastic packaging boxes of different shapes and sizes set out like a city planner’s architectural model. To the viewer’s right there is carefully placed order and to the left an increasingly ruinous disorganisation. Dividing the space between the viewer and the boxes is a light projector which moves continually back and forth along a dolly track, projecting shifting images of the crystalline outlines of the