The 7 Lights

Paul Chan's work is sublime. Terrifying, stunning, boundless and awe-inspiring, it takes you on an optical journey through the instability of our universe, through inexorable fears, dystopian tragedy and yet somehow spits you out in the manicured lawns of Kensington Gardens with a nice warm feeling.

The exhibition is a luxe labyrinth of digital projections which fall on floors, corners and walls, showing puppet-like silhouettes of the everyday. Billed as an “hallucination of the seven days of creation from dusk to dawn”, Chan's vision of genesis is unnerving and violent, melodic and beautiful. Like a terrifying vacuum sucking the entire contents of the world into an alternate dimension, the tangible meets the bizarre as objects are at once reassuringly familiar and unrecognisable. In this trance-like fantasy, swirling birds, hypnotic bicycle wheels, rats, wires all move uncontrollably towards an unknown fate - some majestically float, others tragically attempt but fail to resist the overwhelming pull of this warped gravity.

At times a poverty of light makes it hard to interpret the images, while elsewhere you're confronted with an abundance of visual clarity. This tension aims to highlight the conflict between birth and life, utopia and dystopia. As the debris of our cultural existence intermingle with birds and leaves, you wonder if this is in fact a nightmare fantasy of a world that has just ended. What we see is a post-apocalyptic glimpse of the universe collecting a bounty of useless, incomplete objects in a type of radioactive glow of bright orange, cool blues and bloody red.

The most macabre of these visions are the bodies that hurl downwards against the flow. You can't help but recall the chilling images of people falling to their deaths from the Twin Towers. Are we being ejected from our very own world? When washing dries eerily on lines in 2nd Light, and a wooden table reminiscent of The Last Supper is deserted in 3rd Light, you can only wonder that Chan's projections capture a world without us, a world populated only with inanimate extensions of ourselves.

Chan interprets his dystopian sensitivities more literally in his other work. Recent projects include a video essay on life in Baghdad four weeks before the invasion of Iraq and a portrait of the activist defence lawyer Lynne Stewart - the first in the US to be convicted of aiding terrorists. However, we can be suspicious of Chan's dedication to seriousness in The 7 Lights, when a squirrel spins across the projection and an i-pod nervously swims upstream like a giant sperm - you can't help but smile.

One of the most powerful in the series is 5th Light. Objects smash themselves into a wall, colliding with their own shadows, temporarily merging and creating new forms. As the piece evolves, a large dark shape moves erratically toward the surface of the wall, until it defies the convention entirely, exploding and fragmenting into pieces of matter, emerging to disperse like pollen to populate the world. A Big Bang moment. A stunning replay of the violence of creation.

For Chan, life, light and birth are intangible without the aggressive forces of darkness, death and destruction. Although these themes are hardly uncharted artistic territory, Chan's work is nonetheless a magical, mesmerising adventure.

Where : The Serpentine Gallery, Kensington Gardens, W2 3XA 
When : Until 1st July

• add to del.icio.us
• digg this article!