From Iceland’s evening glow to city glass reflections: Hsieh Chen-Lin’s “Behind the Light” turns light into memories you can see

Key highlights

• The exhibition brings together 14 works across a range of media, including lenticular art, kinetic installations, glass refraction, optical lenses, and acrylic.
• The works draw inspiration from everyday sights encountered over years of travel: skies, clouds, horizons, sunsets, grasslands, and reflections in city glass.
• As viewers move, the colors and images in the works continually change, making the act of viewing itself part of the work.

“How does light become color? How does color become memory? And how does memory reshape the way we see the world?” This is not only the curatorial premise of Hsieh Chen-Lin’s solo exhibition, “Behind the Light,” but also the central question he has continued to explore in recent years. For him, the colors in his works do not simply come from painting. They are layers of sensory impressions left as light passes through air, clouds, glass, and other materials. These colors are not the landscapes themselves, but traces left in memory after the world has passed through them.

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Beginning with travel, collecting the colors left behind by every ray of light

Images from / joychen

Most of the works in the exhibition stem from ways of seeing accumulated over years of travel. From the moments when an airplane window places you level with the clouds to the skies, horizons, grasslands, and light refracted through city glass in different countries, every journey reveals entirely different colors in familiar scenes. “Above the Clouds” is one of the most representative works. The artist organized the many sky photographs he took over a year into 45 sky colors, not to document scenery, but to collect the traces light leaves at different moments.

Light is more than illumination; it is a way of seeing the world

Images from / joychen

Unlike his earlier work, which focused primarily on two-dimensional pieces, “Behind the Light” introduces a range of media for the first time, including lenticular art, kinetic installations, optical lenses, glass refraction, and acrylic. Light no longer remains on the picture plane. It truly enters the space, becoming something viewers can experience firsthand. As viewing position, movement speed, and angle shift, so do the light, colors, and images in the works, appearing and disappearing as each viewing creates a different sensory experience.

Memory is not preserved; it is continually recreated

Images from / joychen

Another important thread in the exhibition is the artist’s understanding of “memory.” In “Fragments of Memory,” color is divided into fragments and reassembled through the act of viewing, reminding us that memory is not a reproduction of the past, but the result of being continually seen and reconstructed. “Behind the Light” does not deliberately depict grand landscapes. Instead, it returns to skies, clouds, horizons, and urban light and shadow that everyone has seen. Through lenticular art, refraction, and kinetic installations, Hsieh Chen-Lin reinterprets these deeply familiar sights, turning light from something that simply illuminates a space into a medium connecting color, memory, and seeing.

Perhaps after leaving the exhibition, the next time you look up at the evening sky or see light reflected on glass, you will begin to notice that the colors you once took for granted have been quietly changing all along.

Images from / joychen

Images from / joychen

“Behind the Light”

Exhibition dates: July 3-19, 2026
Hours: 1:00-7:00 p.m.
Venue: Whimsy Works (No. 7, Lane 21, Section 1, Anhe Road, Da’an District, Taipei City, Taiwan)

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