Infrared Dreams: A Conversation on Stillness, Perception, and the Unseen
The Path Ahead (2022) A winding path, obscured by floral and fauna, leading into the ocean expanse.
Q: What is Infrared Dreams?
A: Infrared Dreams is a body of landscape photographs inspired by a poem by Wang Wei called Deer Park.
The poem describes an empty mountain where no one is visible, yet voices echo through the forest. Light returns to the moss in the deep woods.
I was drawn to that tension between absence and presence — the idea that something can be deeply felt without being seen. This collection began as a way of exploring that space through landscape.
Nirvana (2023) A collage of maple leaves and various local flora and fauna make up this composition.
Q: Why did you choose to work with infrared photography?
A: Infrared photography allows me to work with a spectrum of light that exists beyond human vision. I actually developed a custom filter within Adobe Lightroom to further refine the colors captured through the IR lens.
When landscapes are photographed this way, foliage becomes pale and luminous, and the atmosphere shifts into something quieter and more ambiguous.
I’m not using infrared to transform the landscape into something surreal. I’m using it to reveal something that already exists, but often goes unnoticed.
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Q: The work feels very still and meditative. Is that intentional?
A: Yes. Stillness is central to how I approach image-making.
The landscapes may appear empty at first, but they’re never truly empty. They hold time, memory, and presence.
I’m interested in what happens when you stay with an image longer than we’re used to — when you allow it to unfold rather than immediately moving on.
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Q: How does this body of work connect to your broader practice?
A: Infrared Dreams is the philosophical core of my practice.
It reflects how I think about photography more broadly — not just as a way of documenting the world, but as a way of deepening perception.
Much of my work is rooted in stillness, restraint, and the idea that meaning often exists just beyond what we can immediately name.
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Enclave (2024). A hike into Altadena’s windingly condensed Gabrielino Trail becomes intensely atmospheric under infrared, a year before the Eaton Fire.
Q: There’s a strong sense of atmosphere and emotion in these images. What do you hope viewers experience?
A: I don’t approach the work with a fixed outcome in mind.
But I do hope the images create space — space for reflection, for quiet, for a different kind of attention.
If someone can stay with an image long enough to feel something shift, even subtly, then the work has done what it’s meant to do.
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Q: Does your cultural background influence this work?
A: Yes, very much so.
On cliff’s edge, along the Northern California coast, I surrendered to siren echoes of the ocean and the silence of nature’s endless beauty.
As a Chinese American artist, I often return to classical Chinese poetry and philosophy as a way of thinking about landscape and presence.
Wang Wei’s work, in particular, has been important to me because it approaches nature not as a subject to capture, but as something to be experienced through stillness and awareness. I actually happened upon Wei’s anthology of poems, beautifully translated by David Hinton, during a fateful visit at the Culver City Julian Dixon Library, which coincidentally has a Japanese garden.
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Q: Why landscapes?
A: Landscapes offer a kind of openness that I find difficult to access elsewhere.
They don’t demand attention in the same way portraits or narratives do. Instead, they allow for a quieter, more personal form of engagement.
In that openness, I think people are able to encounter something of themselves.
