Variable dimensions
Pak created New York Public Library Projects (NYPLP) (2008) during a residency in New York, using public libraries as exhibition spaces and the books they house as raw materials. One of the nine parts of this work is Page 22 (Half Folded Library) , a site-specific installation for which Pak covertly folded dog-ears on page 22 of every second book (a total of approximately 15,500 books) in the 58th Street Branch Library in Manhattan. By claiming it as a “solo exhibition,” Pak intentionally turned a public institution into a private and personal museum where his works are more or less a “permanent collection.” Being open-ended as far as further interpretation (or not) by readers who encounter the folded pages, the project tests the political and social potential of personal gestures in the public realm. It is also an ironic commentary on the increasingly self-estranged yet narcissistic art world.
Pak Sheung Chuen’s practice can be described as immaterial, everyday, process-based, and collaborative. Without producing additional objects, Pak’s projects usually start with a familiar but not necessarily acknowledged idea. However, they go beyond a conceptual gesture. Through repetition and continuously anonymous intervention, the idea gradually starts to take form and infiltrates into the surroundings, leaving subtle traces. Although never visually spectacular, Pak’s projects reconfigure a personal system that involves bodily actions and effectively challenges the existing societal logic and commodity-based culture.
The series Nightmare Wallpapers represents a shift if Chuen’s practice, allowing the artist to immerse himself in an “artistic pilgrimage of self healing” following the failure of the 2014 Umbrella Movement...
After engaging primarily with video and photography for more than a decade, Chen turned to painting to explore the issue of urban change and memories—both personal and collective...
After engaging primarily with video and photography for more than a decade, Chen turned to painting to explore the issue of urban change and memories—both personal and collective...
Empire’s Borders II – Passage and Empire’s Borders II – Workers are from the three-channel film installation Empire’s Borders II – Western Enterprise, Inc...
The video Swimming in rivers of Glue is composed of various images of nature, exploring the themes of exploration of space and its colonization...
The Tower of Babel is an installation of large-format photographs that forces the audience to occupy a central position through its monumental scale...
Untitled (Perfect Lovers + 1) by Cerith Wyn Evans takes as its starting point Felix Gonzales-Torres’s seminal work Untitled (Perfect Lovers) , in which two clocks were synchronized and left to run without interference, the implication being that one would stop before the other...
603 Football Field presents a soccer game played inside a small student apartment in Shanghai...
The work Calendars is composed of 1001 images of deserted public areas in Singapore printed on pages of a calendar set from the year of 2020 until 2096...
With a habit of reading eight to ten books at the same time, Chong paints his two-foot tall novel covers through referencing an extensive reading list (accessible on Facebook) he has kept since 2006...
A Portrait: Covering and Cleaning is an installation of six black-and-white video projections...