The truth is always there even though no one can really see it. Nevertheless, people continually try to detect and measure what reality is using various techniques. To this end, I focus my camera on night skies with long time exposures. Although the night sky seems as dark as black to the eye, the colors of night will be revealed by the camera using long exposures. The results surpass our vision.
Human vision is limited by the physiological nature of the human eye. There are two kinds of cells on the retina: rod cells and cone cells. The function of the cone cell is to differentiate colors, but it is functional only when the environment is bright enough. In contrast, the function of rod cell is to identify shapes of objects, and it works better than cones in the dark. Thus, in dim light, people can only sense the form of an object without its color.
Even though the operation of the camera originated from the conception of human vision, and for a long time photography was viewed as a way to document what humans see, actually photography can do more than that. The extension of visual experience is exemplified by this series of works. Both the camera and human eyes are able to receive light, but colors are not available to the eye in the dark. However in darkness, the camera still can record light and color which are accumulated on film during long time exposure. As a result, the image is the same as the right color beyond the limit of human eye.
To people, night sky is not an entity but more like an idea, because it is neither visible nor touchable. The Night sky does not present shape or boundary, so it is impossible to indicated what it is and where it is. This series of works tries to show the night beyond human sight, and to present its colorful hues that are unique every night. The colors on the photos are affected natural phenomena that are time-dependent. Scientifically speaking, the night sky is the atmosphere between the Earth and outer space. The light accumulated on the film includes the reflection from the ground and the light transmitted from the universe.
Moreover, the signs of season, weather and location are recorded by these photos of night skies. The nights of four seasons include different celestial bodies, or constellations, when the earth is confronting different parts of the universe. According to meteorology, the differences in the nights of four seasons are caused by the filtering effects of changing weather conditions. Most of the light reflected from the ground is generated by human activities, like the streetlamp, the neon billboards, the flash of metropolitan buildings and so on. As a result, the light and shades in my photos reflect not only the universal and meteorological conditions, but also human activity at particular time and place.
