【Article by Department of English】

In the crisp atmosphere of this November, faculty and students from the NCCU Department of English visited the Fubon Art Museum to view Meeting You Halfway, a special exhibition by British artist Anthony McCall. This off-campus visit not only allowed students to extend their aesthetic experience from literary texts to real-life artistic spaces, but also strengthened communication and interaction between teachers and students through the shared activity of viewing art.
Within the exhibition rooms where light and shadow intertwined, teachers and students discussed the concepts behind the works as well as their personal impressions, turning the act of art appreciation into a profound experience of aesthetic reflection.

Meeting You Halfway is Anthony McCall’s first large-scale solo exhibition in Taiwan. The exhibition reviews his fifty years of artistic practice, presenting works ranging from his early and iconic performance-film piece Landscape for Fire (1972), to four representative horizontal “Solid Light” installations, a spatial installation, and a vertical model installation. In the “Solid Light” gallery, McCall skillfully employs optics to create perceptions that shift between two-dimensional and three-dimensional space, breaking away from traditional viewing experiences and allowing visitors to encounter image and space, surface and volume simultaneously. The final section of the exhibition features Skylight (2020), one of McCall’s “Acoustic Series” installations, which combines the sound of thunder with a vertical beam of light to create a “vertical cone of solid-light married to a thunderstorm,” enabling viewers to explore the diverse modes of interaction between sound and image.
In addition, the exhibition presents an extensive collection of drawings, photographs, and archival documents in a documentary-style display, offering audiences deeper insight into McCall’s creative trajectory.

The way the exhibition seems to “sculpt with light” draws viewers irresistibly into the works. The most astonishing discovery during the visit was that McCall’s pieces can be film, sculpture, and even a kind of spatial performance all at once. Through simple projection, light appears to gain physical presence, forming shapes that viewers can walk into or move through, like a living volume suspended in the gallery. With haze diffusing the light, the rooms felt almost cosmic.
When approaching the projection, the light takes on a “thicker,” more substantial texture; farther away, it dissolves into something like floating dust. The effect is especially striking in Line Describing a Cone, where the movement of people in the gallery subtly shifts the beam's trajectory, making the audience feel like an integral part of the artwork itself.  
This off-campus visit not only allowed faculty and students to understand the relationship between light and space in an entirely new way, but also offered a rare and memorable artistic experience. Even after leaving the exhibition, the shapes of light continued to echo in their minds.