The opposite of emptiness is desire is a multi-channel video installation consisting of a two-channel HD video projection on adjacent walls and three CRT monitors with accompanying sound. One projection displays a silent text-based dialogue, while the other shows footage evoking a suspended reality—an abandoned beach and eroded cliffs washed in vivid pink tones, forming an uncanny landscape adrift in time. The CRT monitors, arranged sculpturally across the floor and low plinths, loop fragments of natural imagery: the sea pulling away, a flower blooming and fading, ghostlike traces of human presence. These visual elements are accompanied by intermittent ambient sound, creating an environment that feels both intimate and distant.

The work explores desire not as a longing for connection or fulfillment, but as something shaped through absence, delay, and the unreachable. It reflects on how modern life distorts and intensifies desire—how the pursuit of intimacy, beauty, or meaning becomes a cycle of repetition and incompletion. Through a silent dialogue between landscapes and human absence, the work drifts through a time when connection feels constant yet hollow—when closeness is simulated but never fully inhabited. By holding space for what is unspoken and unseen, it asks: what if the opposite of emptiness is not fulfillment, but the endless chase itself?

Please contact lk2994@columbia.edu for the password to view the work.