Silent Chorus

An audiovisual installation based on the Bawangling mountain region of Hainan Island's tropical rainforest. Shot entirely during night-time, the video footage showcases the rainforest’s bio-fluorescent phenomenon under ultraviolet light, revealing vibrant colour palettes invisible to the human eye under normal conditions. The sound material includes field recordings from the core area of the rainforest, and traditional Li songs were then reconstructed to integrate with the visual in the final immersive installation.

Silent Chorus approaches photography as a process of searching, encountering and discovering within darkness. Working at night in the tropical rainforest of Hainan, China, I positioned a stationary camera and moved through the surrounding environment with a handheld ultraviolet torch. As the light passed across vegetation and other organisms, unexpected patterns of biofluorescence emerged momentarily from the darkness.

What began as an experimental exploration of the limits of photographic perception led to an unexpected ecological discovery: the observation of biofluorescence in numerous endemic species for which this phenomenon had not previously been documented. These encounters revealed aspects of the rainforest's biodiversity that had remained largely unseen, demonstrating how artistic experimentation can open new possibilities for ecological observation and knowledge production.

Rather than capturing predetermined subjects, the camera recorded an unfolding encounter between artificial illumination, biological phenomena and the uncertainty of human observation. The resulting moving images retain the duration, unpredictability and physical process of this photographic exploration. My own bioacoustic field recordings and sound composition extend the investigation beyond the visible frame, bringing together different sensory dimensions of the rainforest.

Through this process, Silent Chorus proposes an expanded photographic practice in which image-making becomes an act of ecological inquiry. It questions the assumption that photography simply records what is already visible, exploring instead how technological mediation, embodied observation and multisensory attention might reveal unfamiliar relationships within a complex living environment.

Rather than presenting the rainforest as a landscape to be comprehensively observed or documented, the work acknowledges the partial, situated and evolving nature of human perception, inviting a reconsideration of how we encounter, understand and coexist with the more-than-human world.