Peace Piece II is a film in which sound logic is derived from image. It continues my earlier exploration in Peace Piece I, where the visual structure was shaped by Bill Evans’ original recording. In this second work, I no longer attempt to translate music into image. Instead, the sound constructs a parallel logic within the visual space.

The sound material consists of two elements: a recurring percussive hum recorded by striking glass with chopsticks, and a monk’s chanting preserved from a one-minute video my parents sent me from China. I grew up in a religious household, surrounded by Buddhist thought without fully sharing my family’s belief. Still, its ritual habits and existential questions have remained with me. I remember being ten years old, sitting in the living room while my mother told me that, according to the sutras, the world is a projection of consciousness: the table, the chairs, everything defined as material.

In Peace Piece II, flower shadows appear on screen as unstable traces. They are sometimes sharp, sometimes diffuse, but never the flower itself. Their shifting forms echo the sutra’s description of all things as dreams and illusions, as well as an unease that has followed me since childhood. The shadows expand, collapse, and accumulate again, like thoughts gathering beyond control.

I cut, duplicated, and stacked the one-minute chanting recording, altering the speed of the voice to shift its pitch. The content of the sutra gradually dissolves through editing. Its form remains, but its meaning drifts into fragmented thought. These layers follow the rhythm of the appearing shadows, interpreting meditation not as clarity, but as a state of wandering, interruption, and return.

Each time the pendulum lamp and its circular light converge, the glass hum sounds. With the bright light, the shadows and tangled chanting briefly disperse. The viewer is called back to the present by a single resonance, then slowly lost again.