Wall  
cast handmade Kozo paper, bricks, muslin, wood

The project was exhibited in the “Fall 2022 Symposium: Machine as Medium” at Yale's Center for Collaborative Arts and Media. It is a multidisciplinary collaboration with Helen He, a Yale biology Ph.D. candidate in the Genetics Department, and Owen Wang, a Yale architecture graduate student.

Helen’s experiments investigate the polarized environment of zebrafish skin and involve frequent translation between the tangible living fish and the intangible microscopic images in dramatically different scales. Responding to these aspects in her research, the wall that consisted of paper bricks both defines an orientation and acts as an abstract boundary between the tangible and intangible, the physical and virtual.

Audiences can experience three stages, corresponding to three different scales in Helen’s research, as they interact with this piece. The first stage is the tangible human scale when the physical bricks are seen as fish tanks. The second stage is the scale for microsurgeries. As fishes are magnified but still recognizable, the individual bricks fade into the silhouette of the wall. In the third scale of the microscopic subcellular structures, the audiences walk closer to the wall and peek through the gaps among bricks. The “disappearing” of the surrounding environments brings the viewers into an intangible, abstract space.