O-1 Visas
What is lost when natural darkness is gone? The situation is especially dire in the Matsu Islands, a Taiwanese outpost besieged nightly by hundreds of unregulated Chinese fishing boats that use LEDs to lure squid, causing the sea and the sky to glow neon green far across a contested maritime border. In Jigging Green, a recent exhibition at Watershed Art & Ecology, Chang-Ching “Casper” Su mixes conceptual and documentary tools to render the effect. Small styrofoam lightboxes, like fish coolers, feature color transparencies generated by exposing film directly to the lit sky. Larger animated ones, recalling the décor of Asian-American restaurants, activate Su’s photographs of rare bioluminescent species at the edge of the surf and a horizon of green ship beacons that blot out real stars. To read a map that tracks light pollution in the Min-Tai region, viewers must first, compromisingly, illuminate the solar-powered tourist keychains Su has hung on a wall in the shape of satellite data from Global Fishing Watch. Combining poetics and investigation, Su aptly presents this particular environmental hazard, which doubles as a geopolitical threat and cannot help but be a harbinger of our global dystopian future.
—Lori Waxman 2026-02-26 11:21 AM