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. The other loops footage evoking a suspended reality: an abandoned beach, eroded cliffs in vivid pink tones, the sea pulling away, a flower blooming and fading, and ghostlike traces of human presence. The CRT monitors, arranged sculpturally across the floor, present moving-image collages—two separate video layers merging into a single frame, their shifting transparencies forming fleeting, composite images that appear and dissolve. Intermittent ambient sound creates an environment that feels both intimate and distant.

Here, desire is not framed as connection or fulfillment, but as something shaped through absence, delay, and the unreachable. The suspended landscapes, partial images, and dissolving composites mirror how modern life distorts and intensifies longing, turning the pursuit of intimacy, beauty, or meaning into a cycle of repetition and incompletion. By pairing silent dialogue with fractured, layered images, the work moves through a time when connection feels constant yet hollow, when closeness is simulated but never fully inhabited. It holds space for what is unspoken and unseen, asking: 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.