Untitled (Octavia with Meteor 1), 2020, archival pigment print, 50.8 by 60.96 cm. Courtesy of the artist.
Arthur Ou is a Taiwanese artist based in New York who began his studies in engineering before shifting to photography. Viewfinder (2020–ongoing), a series of photographs Ou created in the time leading up to and during the Covid-19 pandemic, meditate on the complex apparatus of light, machinery, physiology, chemistry, and wonder that makes images possible in the very first place. The journey began with a visit to an advanced telescope facility in the mountains of New Mexico, where Ou became more fascinated by the apparatus of seeing than the images gathered by the telescope itself. As a technology of vision extending our own vision, photography’s intimacy with light prompts the question of what looks back at us when we push further into our desire to reach beyond. When our biological sight intercepts rays of light traveling through the universe, our eyes reach back in time to meet the original light of the Big Bang as it disperses forward in time. But Ou reminds us that the power to reach so far comes not only from optics, but also from our sense of wonder—a form of vision not reducible to the needs of mere survival.
It was with this in mind that Ou asked his young daughter Octavia to balance a small fragment of a meteorite on the tip of her finger for her father to take a macroscopic picture. She asked her father many questions about where in space such a stone could have come from. Then, in 2020, while New York was in lockdown, Ou began to take portraits of children in his neighborhood, starting with Octavia. All between 5 and 7—the age a child begins to question their location and surroundings—the children are bathed in light as they peer into the distance through binoculars, a reminder of our need to wonder at one’s own small place amidst the vastness of the unknown.
