Scott Wu

"The Wholeness of The Four Primary Elements"

Section MS20, Steven (Haoge) Gan

Keywords: environment, sensation, book, photography

Through the use of photography, my research investigates how the four main elements—Earth, Water, Fire, and Wind—coexist and mutually evolve. In order to understand how these elements function as interconnected manifestations of a single, cohesive energy system rather than as distinct entities, my research draws on both scientific understanding and Buddhist cosmology. The four elements represent energy's degrees of freedom in Buddhist thinking, representing matter's ongoing transition from solidity to fluidity, heat, and motion. Scientifically speaking, these are the physical states of solid, liquid, gas, and plasma, each of which contains elements of the others and interacts with them dynamically.