Ann Veronica Janssens’ Coloured Mist Room and the Path Towards Enlightenment
📍Winsing Art Place, Taipei City
Do you still remember how you spent your first few days of this new year? As a curious wanderer in the world of the arts and culture, it goes without saying that a visit to an art exhibition is how this writer began the year of 2022.
Tucked away in a quiet neighbourhood in Taipei city’s Neihu District, Winsing Art Place’s understated presence makes it easy to miss for first-time visitors. A hybrid of gallery, cafe and bookstore, Winsing Art Place has become the city’s go-to cultural destination and, indisputably, a ‘third place’ that breathes artistic air into an area predominated by newly-developed concrete jungle.
Winsing Art Place in Taipei City
My visit to Winsing Art Place was prompted by the exhibition Ann Veronica Janssens: Green, Yellow and Pink. Having already missed the artist’s exhibition in London’s Wellcome Collection a few years back, I didn’t want to miss out this time around.
Born in the United Kingdom, Ann Veronica Janssens is a contemporary visual artist known for her experimentation with light and colour. Janssens says, “I’m interested in what escapes me, not in order to arrest it, but on the contrary, in order to experiment with the ungraspable”. Fascinated by her interests in perceptual experience, Janssens develops her work using a variety of mediums, including glass, light, projection, sound, liquids and artificial fogs.
Exhibition poster outside Winsing Art Place
At Winsing Art Place, the artist’s solo exhibition features one of her most renowned work: Green, Yellow and Pink. This 2017 creation invites viewers to wander through a room permeated with fog coloured in green, yellow and pink, challenging their perception of this mundane world and perhaps, for some, their very own existence.
Upon arriving at Winsing Art Place, the staff gathered us visitors outside Green, Yellow and Pink, and handed out a panic button (in case of emergency) to each one of us. After listening to the instructions and visitor’s guidelines, the staff opened the glass door — the entrance to Green, Yellow and Pink. I tiptoed into the space through this magical portal, and sooner than I anticipated, I found myself fully immersed in Janssens’s misty universe coloured in apple green.
Entrance that leads to Janssens’ Green, Yellow and Pink
Visibility was limited to only within an arm’s reach — anything beyond that would simply disappear into thin air. For the first ten minutes, I felt completely lost. Fear took over me as I tried to find my coordinates in this barren landscape of abstraction. It wasn’t long before I came close to one side of the wall and, by clinging to it, I did my first roundabout of space, in such a way that echoes the devotees who circumambulated inside the Buddhist caves and sacred stupa in ancient India.
In Janssens’ own words, “Gazing at mist is an experience with contrasting effects. It appears to abolish all obstacles, materiality, the resistances specific to a given context, and at the same time, it seems to impart a materiality and tactility to light.” Based on my own experience, gazing at the ever-present mist was not only a challenge of my perception, but also my understanding of what is it that defines time, space, and our existence. “To step inside the space is to leave the regular world behind, and to encounter a space in which all experience of surface, depth, even time is obscured by a curtain of colour made physical,” says Emily Sargent who curated the artist’s exhibition at Wellcome Collection in 2015.
This philosophical approach to understanding everyday phenomena is, in my humble opinion, so intrinsic to the immersive experience I’ve had when exploring the coloured mist room created by Ann Veronica Janssens.
In a place where “social and temporal markers” have been abolished, one of the things that I could do when inside Green, Yellow and Pink was to focus on the change in colour. As I ventured throughout this space, I was starting to notice that the apple-green colour at the entrance subtly blends into lemon yellow, and then hot pink. And if one looks close enough, one finds additional colours at the point where two colours meet. Though an abstract and somewhat metaphysical experience, the saturation of these colours evoke a sense of familiarity and warmth, akin to a gentle embrace from your loved ones.
Writer immersed in hot pink mist of Janssens’ Green, Yellow and Pink
All of a sudden, I was hit by an epiphany. This experience I’ve had in Janssens’ coloured mist brought to mind a phrase from the Heart Sutra or Prajna Paramita: “Form is emptiness and emptiness is form”. In the Chinese version of the scripture, the word ‘ se’, literally ‘colour’, is used to denote the visible. Coming from one of the most recited and studied scriptures in East Asia Buddhism, this phrase embodies the ultimate reality that every phenomena we see in this world is non-existent (because nothing is permanent); and both form and emptiness are non-separate in present continuous.
In my view, Janssens’ Green, Yellow and Pink perfectly embodies the doctrine of ‘emptiness’ articulated by this popular scripture. In Green, Yellow and Pink, visitors find themselves in a room full of colour and, at the same time, “empty” as they wander through the dispersion of tiny droplets of water that gave “form” to the colour. This philosophical approach to understanding everyday phenomena is, in my humble opinion, so intrinsic to the immersive experience I’ve had when exploring the coloured mist room created by Ann Veronica Janssen.
On top of it, it also occurred to me that the pervasive nature of these coloured mists act like a neutralised filter. When inside Green, Yellow and Pink, viewers coming from all walks of life are transformed into the colour of the space they’re in. Whatever the colour of our skins, we’re all equal when we find ourselves in Ann Veronica Janssens’ otherworldly creation. After all, as the artist puts it, “nothing is more beautiful than a person’s own perception”, and what she aims to do is pushing that limit.