Is there a word in the human language that describes the ghostly aftermath of an emotional event?
If there is, it would perhaps be fitting to describe Andro Pang’s haunting slices of often post-life. Armed with a remarkable grasp of the soulful power of light and color, the photographic qualities of the Indonesian artist’s 3D renders use minimal elements to evoke a maximum of feeling. His frames are regularly devoid of human characters, leaving objects like chairs and sometimes celestial bodies to take the place of terrestrial ones. This enhances a feeling of entering these crafted instants as a solitary witness, as if gently peeking behind the curtain of reality itself.
And even when, like in his work ‘Isolation’, people are still there to ‘tell the tale’, they do so without showing their faces. No, his affective imagery manages to convey their sense of loss, loneliness, hope and despair (sometimes all combined in the same work) without relying on tearful gazes or tortured facial expressions. These fragments of his dreamy universe allow the viewer to bring their own subtext, filling our heads with questions without forcing a clear answer. When we see a phone receiver hanging off the hook in a flooded hallway or a mounted rose greeting us among the debris of previous failed attempts, we are stimulated to mentally recreate events that might have led up those ‘after’ images.
Pang finds inspiration from many sources and sometimes wears them on his sleeve, like with his clever wink to ‘The Truman Show’ in ‘Ordinary World’. ‘I Love You In Every Universe’ made me think of a time when I myself creatively chased bodiless shadows and I was eager to set sail up into the clouds on the floating dingy moored in ‘Perfect Things’. But as ‘Are You Happy’ rightfully questions, perhaps up above is not really any different than down below.
Tinged with sadness and longing, Andro’s symbolic musings almost seem to echo with unspoken words and whispered thoughts. And when exploring his sunlit deserts, abandoned corridors and fields of flowers long enough, you might just hear what’s being said.