Nocturnal Whispers of Pan:
Lo Ch`ing and Thomas Rose continue to collaborate on a new project that originates with discussions on the meaning of images, and the cultural perceptions that frame them. Lo Ch`ing reinvents the cultural concept of landscape placing his focus on a kind of irrational spacing and the abstraction of traditional forms producing images that "play" with landscape. Rose works almost exclusively with interior space defined by the architectural plane—both visible and invisible. His work incorporates dreams and envisions the architectural frame of the house as his iconic motif.
The interesting aspect of their collaboration is the visually dissimilar forms and images held in tension by the artists' strong affinity for ambiguity and the chance encounter. Both Rose and Lo Ch`ing seemingly await the moment when their images coalesce into a poetic moment. Rose's childlike elements cluttering the domestic environment are surrounded by selected, and edited images collaged into the ambiguous interior space. Lo Ch`ing's sense of play, his childlike iconic forms and images enrich a long-standing tradition of literati poetics. He has constructed the poetic framework for this collaboration with his poems that accompany the paired images, creating a singularly surreal visual third construction existing between image and imagination.
It is in this shared vision that Lo Ch`ing and Rose envie' the dream of the enchanted Villa of The Mysteries in Pompeii and are for Rose and Lo Ch`ing a foil for a visual dialogue on memory, culture and dreams — of the initiation into consciousness of the self and the awareness of pleasure.