The $140,000 artwork was completed by Sydney glass artist Warren Langley last week and will be part of the ACT's contribution to the Australian Pavilion during the Shanghai World Expo 2010, the biggest ever held.

To create Microscopia, Langley employed an innovative process using linear light emitting diodes to mix colours and to ''paint'' with light, creating dynamic visual effects.

Langley said the end result of the 6m by 3m work was ''pretty much'' as he had envisaged. ''When you've got a project like this with a series of deadlines, the whole thing becomes a bit like a military operation, you plan everything down to the last detail. This one was a bit like that and by the time we got there we knew exactly what we had to do,'' he said.

But there is also room for the unknown. ''It was a bit like opening a box of candy. I was working on the notion of painting with light, LED pure colour and had done all the models, but it was only when we put it all together I realised the potential of what we could do,'' he said.

''I started to layer up the images by suspending more of the light components on a clear surface, which allowed light behind to come through and was able to generate layers of light. We hadn't worked out how we would achieve that until we physically did it and it was a really interesting effect,'' he said.

Microscopia will form the backdrop to more than 200 business events at the Australian Pavilion during the Expo, which runs from May to October. The work will be returned to Canberra to be displayed permanently in the new Women's and Children's Hospital, at the Canberra Hospital.

For more on this story, see today's Canberra Times.