Prism: at L'art Pur Foundation

at  L'Art Pur Foundation, Riyadh , Saudi Arabia

The term prism, originating in ancient Greece and Rome, derives from the Greek “πρίσμα” (prisma), meaning “a sawed-off object” — a reference to its polyhedral form. In his Optics, the Greek mathematician Euclid explored the linear propagation of light.

Taking ancient Greek optics as its conceptual point of departure, this group exhibition brings together artists Ngoc Nâu, Yohei Yama, and Liang Yujue, who, through installation, painting, and video, deconstruct the prism’s dual identity as both a physical object and a philosophical metaphor. The exhibition transforms the physical refraction of light into a multidimensional exploration of individual memory, intuitive inscription, and technological mediation, constructing within a contemporary context a speculative practice on “seeing” and “being.”

In In the Quiet After , Ngoc Nâu casts individual memory into a prism — a lightbox installation that houses oral histories from the Vietnamese War diaspora, with AI-generated imagery intervening as a “co-thinker” in the reconstruction of memory. Here, machine algorithms refract migratory trauma and colonial residue into an ambiguous spectrum: within the fissures between archival shadows and fictional visions, intimate scars and geopolitical pressures erupt from the dark side of history, questioning how technological iteration calibrates memory into a controllable index of refraction.

In his Lines series, Yohei Yama engages the prism’s geometric essence. The autonomously growing traces on the canvas are at once the absolute rational measure of space and the temporal crystallization of improvised energy. Within the “stillness before thought,” the line operates with a dual logic: constructing rational order while recording the dynamic trajectories of intuitive inscription. The viewer’s gaze is compelled to travel along these linear light paths, encountering an aesthetic resonance between the Eastern ideal of “a single breath” and the Western tradition of Action Painting, elevating painting into a temporal testimony of existence.

In The Future Is as Old as the Hills, Liang Yujue confronts the modern paradox of the prism: four-channel video takes the Acoustic Vehicle Alerting System (AVAS) of electric vehicles as a case study, filtering it through the grain of old DV footage and the constructs of game engine modeling to expose the “light-making mechanisms” co-produced by capital and technology. When the slogan “Let’s shape the sound of the future” loops in a psychedelic sound field, and “even better than the real thing” is reassembled as a hyperreal anthem, the acoustic simulacrum reveals that the “real” we pursue is merely a monochromatic spectrum filtered through the utilitarian prism.

Together, the practices of these three artists construct a vast optical apparatus: memory reveals its fissures through mediation, time inscribes its trajectories in linear extension, and simulacra generate vertigo within the oscillations of sound and light. The exhibition space itself becomes the theatre of the prism — the audience moves through the dispersive bands of memory, the vector movements of line, and the vibrating frequencies of sound, witnessing how light is sliced, bent, and recomposed into a cognitive cartography. When the wisdom of classical optics intersects with the contemporary prism of the simulacrum, a central insight emerges: existence is never a single beam of light, but an infinite refraction through the prism; each dispersion holds an untold historical possibility, and each dark facet is an unwritten entry point into the future — the prism does not create light; it reveals the complexity light has always carried.