Kwan Storm #05

Brother Kwan emerged last year as both a project and an online avatar. His story is an exploration of outer and inner space, based on the trajectory of NASA's Cassini mission to Saturn.

I fuse photography, collage, and digital image manipulation into works that form a continuing story of my own existence. I combine images from the Cassini Satellite with both images of myself from my Instagram account and visualisations of biometric data from my phone.

So each work is a collage both interns of material - but also of moments in time.

I'm profoundly inspired by physics, William Blake, Joseph Beuys, Yayoi Kusama and Bruce Lee - as well as the comic book art I loved growing up.

For this particular image, I took raw images from NASA’s Cassini Satellite of a solar eclipse of Saturn’s moon Titan and collaged them with events that were happening simultaneously in my life. The red colour of the storm
comes from another eclipse of the sun, this time by me, as I took a shot by accident through my hand on a brilliant day. The dots represent all my heartbeats as measured by my watch, between 01.14 – 02.14 on 25/03/16.
So it's a collage in terms of both materials and moments in time - (a giclee print of a digitally generated image), hand-finished with graphite, silverleaf and enamel paint.

The visualisation is inspired by William Blake's poem:
"To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour"