By Chloe Hsieh
Walking into senior Amber Chea’s exhibition, the first thing you see is its title, “The Sound Within the Mirror,” alongside a massive quilt of cascading, fraying fabric pinned up on the white gallery wall. Looking closer, you can see the fabric’s slow rise and fall, the way lungs expand and deflate; the sculpture breathes.
Chea was the main designer of the DeLight Art Gallery exhibition this year, as well as the breathing sculpture piece.
The DeLight Art Foundation focuses on student artwork, amplifying the voices of youth through galleries and exhibitions. This year, they created the exhibition “The Sound Within The Mirror,” inspired by a work from Korean poet Yisang.
“We decided to base our gallery on the abstract concept of the disconnect between our inside selves, defined by our inner voices, passions, and dreams, and the versions of ourselves shaped by external pressures, from the demands of school to violations of human dignity,” Chea said.
DeLight Art Foundation certainly fosters students’ creativity, though not without effort on the students’ part.
“We are given high, high expectations to make the gallery as sophisticated and professional as we can,” Chea said. I spent eight hours every day at the art studio slaving away for a whole two months, because what I lacked as an inexperienced student, I had to make up for with sheer effort.”
As lead designer, the responsibility of the title piece naturally fell on Chea’s shoulders. As the first piece of art the audience sees, the title work has to both encapsulate the overall theme of the gallery as well as display the creativity rich within the rest of the exhibition.
Chea also needed to use coding to execute her mechanical “breathing” design, something she had never had any prior experience with.
“This plan was so meaningful to me because it was so intertwined with my philosophy behind art: to be creative in ways that people don’t usually think of,” Chea said. “I wanted to prove that I could be creatively ambitious and still pull it off.
After seven nights with barely any sleep, unhealthy doses of caffeine, and a few crying sessions, the cumulation of Chea’s blood, sweat, and literal tears was done. It was set up within the gallery on opening day, even without any testing.
Yet, when it was turned on, the fabric didn’t move at all.
“My art teachers reassured me that it was too ambitious, that it was bound to fail,” Chea said. “I cried to my dad when I got home. That’s when he told me that I should be seeing this as an experience, not a failure.
That’s when I decided to stop feeling scammed of my hard work; to just get my head on straight and do my best getting it up and running the next day.”
Within the scant hours she had left before the exhibition opened back up for the second day, Chea messaged anyone and everyone who might know something about engineering only to realize, several sleep-deprived, anxiety-ridden hours in, that she just needed to switch the computer programming language.
And finally, it worked.
As viewers filtered in and out, marveling at the art and most of all, Chea’s moving and breathing sculpture piece, they only saw the polished, creative final product of all of DeLight students’ efforts. Just like the exhibition’s focus on the divide between the internal and external presentation of the self, the audience can’t see the hidden stories beneath each piece.
“The entire process was a learning curve for me,” Chea said. “It was the first time I learned that working till I drop doesn’t mean success. I cried a lot for sure, but what I didn’t do is give up.”
