Saturday, July 19 at 1:00 PM (reception video)
Pound Ridge Library
271 Westchester Avenue, Pound Ridge, NY 10576 (direction)
Enjoy light refreshments, live music, and meet the artist. Bring a friend and stay awhile.
July 19 – September 13, 2025
https://poundridgelibrary.org/
https://www.therecorder.org/post/a-focus-on-quiet-overlooked-details
I’m excited to share Invisible Worlds and Silent Colors here at Pound Ridge Library. This is more than a group of photographs. It offers a glimpse into how I experience the world, a collection of moments that asked me to pause, look closer, and press the shutter.
Since picking up a camera at eighteen, I have been drawn to subtle details. The way light brushes across a surface, how a moment can feel deeper than it appears, and the quiet scenes that might otherwise go unnoticed. Photography helps me slow down and observe with care. I look for meaning in reflections, shadows, stillness, and the spaces between clarity and mystery. What moves me most are the in-between moments, those that speak softly and linger without needing to explain themselves.
The photographs in this exhibition come from various chapters of my road travels, near and far. Some were captured during long bike journeys through unfamiliar landscapes. Others were taken close to home. Despite their different/varied origins, they share a common thread, a sense of stillness in the midst of an often incessant world. These are not images of spectacle. Each one is a quiet interruption, a gesture toward something fragile, fleeting, yet quietly powerful.
The images move between exterior and interior, surface and emotion. They invite you to slow your gaze, to notice what rests beneath the obvious, and to find a kind of beauty that slowly reveals itself.
I am grateful to share this journey with you.
Wei Chao is a New York-based multimedia artist with a Master’s degree from NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program, where he was honored with the Artist of the Future award. His background spans creative technology, education research labs, advertising, artist studios, and museums.
Chao’s photography explores the emotional nuances of the human experience and the layered complexity of contemporary life. His work combines storytelling, technical fluency, and compositional precision to create images that are both intimate and expansive.
Total Works: 18 photographs (9 color, 9 black and white)
Dimensions: 19 × 13 inches (framed with spacers in matching sized frames)
Medium: Pigment prints on metallic glossy paper
Edition: Limited edition of 10 prints per image
Pricing: $750 framed, $650 for unframed sub-sequential print
Arantxa Araujo
David Lasday
Ellen Hackl Fagan, ODETTA Gallery
Lisa Stern
Marilyn Tinter
Miriam Songster
Paul Griffin
Scott Harris
Brooklyn, New York, 2017
Soft light from a cloudy day spills into a hallway, reflecting off a red corrugated wall. The color bounces gently between muted surfaces, blending inside and outside into a single quiet moment. It’s a small scene, but something about the stillness felt worth holding onto.
Brooklyn Museum, New York, 2018
During a performance at the Brooklyn Museum in the magic hours, my friend Arantxa was wrapped in a shimmering, translucent outfit that flowed with each breath. Her closed eyes peeked softly through the folds as she leaned slowly toward the ground. She seemed suspended between worlds, her breath shaping the air around her. Translucent folds shimmered with every movement as twilight wrapped the space in quiet glow. The shadows softened, and for a brief interval, she hovered just beyond reach.
Taitung, Taiwan, 2019
One morning, while cycling through Taiwan, I found a spiral of leaves resting by the roadside. Tiny drops formed near-perfect spheres in the center of layered succulent petals, catching light with a subtle shimmer. Their glow was soft, ephemeral, like breath on glass. Time slowed, and direction slipped away beneath the delicate hush of morning. In that stillness, edges softened and forms began to dissolve into one another. Solitude emerged as a delicate presence, and I felt myself drift beyond the bounds of direction and time.
Petra, Jordan, 2019
The sandstone walls of Petra swirl with red and gold, their curves carved by wind and centuries. Each line whispers a quiet story, not of people but of the earth dreaming itself into shape. The Nabataeans built this city from silence and stone, then vanished as if carried off by the desert wind. What remains is a stillness that breathes. What remains is still and listening. Time shaped these walls with wind and silence. Some mysteries are not solved but held—etched in stone and carried gently by the desert air.
Mount Nebo, Jordan, 2019
The Jordanian desert stretches westward, vast and quiet beneath a sky that holds both memory and promise. A winding road drifts through the stillness, leading toward something unseen yet deeply felt. Here, time gathers in the dust and hope rises like warmth from the stones. It is a journey not just across land but toward a place long imagined, where faith meets the horizon.
Sea of Galilee, Israel, 2019
A calm view of the Sea of Galilee, framed by gentle hills and still water. This place holds a quiet power, where nature’s beauty meets timeless mystery. It speaks of courage and trust amid uncertainty, like stepping onto uncertain waves and finding strength to move forward. The still surface of the sea carries both silence and story. Beneath it, a quiet current of trust moves forward, even when the direction is unclear. Here, the water speaks softly of strength that does not need to shout.
Alice’s Home, Boston, 2018
A close-up of glass and liquid turns into something abstract. Lines, colors, and reflections play together. It’s simple at first glance, but the more you look, the more it shifts. Clarity blurs into something softer, like time held still for a second. This photograph was taken on Alice’s 100th birthday, in a moment of quiet intimacy. She had been a piano teacher all her life, graceful in both presence and gesture. A few months later, she passed away, leaving behind the echo of music and a stillness that lingers in the light.
Grace Exhibition Space, New York, 2025
Crimson paint flows across skin, turning the body into a moving canvas. Each brushstroke becomes part of the performance, revealing the tension between self and expression. The work is raw and bold, alive in every gesture and moment of transformation.
This photograph captures the final state of a 30 minute performance piece. Through movement, color, and touch, identity and presence were explored. What remains is not just an image but the trace of something lived.
Havana, Cuba 2017
He watches the sky drift by, its weightless sorrow mirroring his own. Clouds gather, break, and pass, like memories and thoughts too quiet to speak. Alone, yet not lonely, he finds comfort in the silence, and in the sky that never stays, yet always returns.
Seljalandsfoss, Iceland, 2018
Beneath a moody sky, a lone car makes its way through mossy Icelandic plains. There’s something comforting in the isolation, as if the landscape is holding space for the traveler. It’s a quiet return, not just to a place, but to a feeling of belonging. Sometimes the road home is less about where you’re going, and more about what you’re ready to feel again.
Taipei, Taiwan, 2019
These tangled roots and twisting branches remind me of how identity takes shape, not in straight lines but through layered paths. Like the deeply mixed histories and diverse people found there, personal, cultural, and collective stories overlap and entwine, growing outward and inward at the same time. This image speaks to movement, memory, change, and connection, and to the quiet beauty of not always knowing where things begin or end. Despite the complexity, people still find ways to live together, to adapt, and to belong. There is strength in complexity and grace in the unknown.
Hualian, Taiwan, 2019
Even in unpredictable weather, fruit continues to grow, slowly and steadily. This image speaks to a quiet kind of strength, the kind that does not rush but endures with patience and quiet determination. Like many people in Taiwan, the tree does not ask for perfect conditions. It bends with the wind, roots deeper in storms, and still finds a way to offer something full of life, color, nourishment, and quiet resilience.
Chinatown, New York, 2018
In a patch of cracked pavement, framed by the worn backdrop of old buildings, a child stands with quiet elegance and unexpected joy. What might she be thinking in that moment? There is grace in her stillness. She feels like a dancer without a stage, bringing softness to hard places and beauty to what is usually ignored. It is a tender scene, easy to pass by, yet it holds a quiet confidence. Her presence interrupts the worn concrete with softness, offering a glimpse of possibility where none was expected.
In the East Village, beneath a sky heavy with thought, a pickup game stirs to life. Players move with rhythm and instinct, quick and fluid, unscripted and alive. Chain-link fences bear the marks of time, framing the court like a stage. In black and white, the moment breathes. It is fleeting yet full, ordinary yet sacred. Here, the city remembers through motion and presence.
There is quiet strength in stillness.
This horse, poised and attentive, seems to look through the noise of the world. Grounded, alert, unshaken. In its gaze, a presence: calm, unwavering, deeply alive.
It brought to mind a few lines from Wendell Berry’s The Peace of Wild Things:
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief.
I come into the presence of still water…
And I feel above me the day-blind stars waiting with their light.
Soho, New York, 2017
A figure fades into motion on a busy street. The city moves around them, fast, loud, distracted, while they seem to flicker between being seen and being forgotten. It is about that feeling of being present but invisible, overwhelmed by signals and noise. A reminder of how easy it is to disappear in plain sight, swallowed by the constant rush and endless distractions of urban life.
Paris, Texas, 2022
In a quiet, weathered town, time feels paused. Empty buildings and peeling paint tell stories without words. Stories of people, of lives once lived. There is a sadness here, but also something tender.
A character in a Wim Wenders film once wandered through here, searching for something lost—maybe love, maybe himself. Like him, this place holds memory, loss, and the quiet beauty that lingers long after the world has moved on.
Far Rockaway, New York, 2023
Waves rise and fall without rule, weaving wildness into rhythm’s embrace. The shore flows with the tide, where stillness meets motion beneath a sky that murmurs soft secrets in shadowed light.
©2025 Wei Chao, All Rights Reserved
