Voyage
Year: 2023 - 2025 (Ongoing)
Inflatable TPU, flame-retardant fiber canvas, fluorescent acrylic, LED UV light, chip-programmed spotlight (1.5-minute light loop), sound system, aluminum frame
Size: 20 x 7 x 4.4 m
Commissioned by: Balloon Museum
Exhibition Venues:
Palace of Fine Arts, San Francisco, US (March 2025)
Brussels Expo, Brussels, Belgium (October 2024)
Glasmacher Vierte, Düsseldorf, Germany (May 2024)
Old Billingsgate, London, UK (December 2023)
Installation Sound
At the center of the installation floats the Cosmic Dragon, a monumental inflatable creature that hovers like a divine relic in a museum of natural history. Surrounding it are ghostly translucent inflatable phantasms, shifting seamlessly between visibility and disappearance. On the walls, glowing hieroglyphs from Luminous Opera—a pictographic language invented by Kalman Pool and inspired by East Asian scripts—are revealed in Europe for the first time.
The installation is inspired by Pool’s visit to the Mogao Caves in northwestern China, a thousand-year-old Buddhist site filled with murals and celestial beings. Voyage channels this sacred energy into a contemporary, otherworldly encounter—where light, air, and language merge into a poetic cosmology.