‘Time is a Dimension’ by Fong Qi Wei

As you know my world is often all things paper (and always words…I am word girl after all). This collage-orific find, ‘Time is a Dimension’, is by Singapore artist Fong Qi Wen who creates hybrid cityscapes and landscapes from a series of photographs that have been taken with different length exposures in a 2-4 hour period, from sunrise to sunset, in a wide variation of light. They are spliced together to create a layered collage where each strip of image depicts the passage of time, ambiguous in it’s explanation, yet descriptive in its imagery.

“Photography is a medium that is famous for freezing time. The word snapshot suggests that a tiny slice of time is recorded for posterity. But we do know that time is also a dimension, like length, breadth and width. In fact, physicists have a model called space-time: suggesting that time is part of a continuum with the 3 dimensions that we are familiar with. A photographic print is flat, and essentially is made of 2 dimensions: length and width. Yet through composition and lens focus we give a print depth, which is a dimension that is perceived but not physically part of the photographic print. Great photographs (and great paintings) give information in all three dimensions. The best images are the ones which let you feel like you can step directly into the frame into a world which is on the other side. But the print is still an instance. Most paintings and photographs are an instance of time. That’s not the way the world works. We experience a sequence of time, and that’s why a video is somehow more compelling than a freeze frame. I work in the confines of a photographic print, because I like to do so. But in a way, I wanted to break out of this restriction of a single slice of time in photography.”

“Similarly, our experience of a scene is more than a snapshot. We often remember a sequence of events rather than a still frame full of details. In this series, I strive to capture both details and also a sequence of time in a single 2 dimensional canvas. I hope it gives you pause and reconsider what you experience versus what you shoot with your next camera phone.” – Fong Qi Wen