Fong Qi Wei Creates Shimmering Animated GIFs with ‘Time in Motion’

Shanghai Oriental Pearl Sunset,’ 2014. All images courtesy of the artist. 

Fong Qi Wei is a Singaporean new media artist that we’ve covered before, but his latest project, Time in Motion, makes him well worth a re-visit.

Described as a follow-up to Time is a Dimension (TIAD), the latest series finds Wei still in the pursuit of splicing different time periods into single GIF “prints.” In doing so, Wei recreates single land masses and seascapes as looping, strobing kaleidoscopes. The GIFs, Wei describes, are a “constant shimmer of… time.”

Shanghai Freeway Sunrise,’ 2014 his website   Glassy Sunset,’ 2013

It’s worth noting that in his most-recent GIFs, strands of time don’t simultaneously overlap; the suggestion of temporal movement still exists. Wei arranges each splice in chronological order, resulting in tension between linear and non-linear time. All explanations aside, these GIFs are rad.