GALAXIA II is a modern-day take on the aesthetics of ‘Optical Art’ of the 1960s, only this time with LED lighting as its contemporary medium.

Op Art is a perceptual experience that plays with how your vision functions, investigating the area between understanding and seeing. It exploits the functional relationship between the retina of your eye – the organ that ‘sees’ patterns – and your brain, the organ that interprets patterns. Certain visual stimuli can cause confusion between these two organs, resulting in the perception of irrational optical phenomena, something Op Artists used to full effect.

GALAXIA II plays with two perceptual phenomena: firstly the fact that colour is always interpreted by your brain in relation to its context, and secondly the way that the sculpture’s three-dimensional character results in a geometrical instability, especially when you move across the work.

The result is that you experience a slowly changing, pixelated colour sensation, together with the illusion of movement, giving you a feeling of delicious confusion – making you question the geometric order of the sculpture and the seeming chaos of the lighting and geometry. Enhancing this sensation is the minimalist music, composed by Sherman Tang.