The Third Seal—They Are Already Old. They Don’t Need To Exist Anymore is part of The Seven Seals , Tsang’s ongoing series of digital videos that are projected as installations onto the walls and ceilings of dark rooms. Using texts and computer technology, the series draws its reference from various sources—the Bible, Judeo-Christian eschatology, existentialism, metaphysics, politics, among others—to articulate the world’s complexity and the dilemmas that people face while approaching “the end of the world.” The Third Seal is a nineteen-by-twenty-seven-foot projection on a single wall that, together with sound, creates an immersive and dynamic environment. Crawling up from the bottom of the wall are black, worm-like texts that comment on class struggle, revolutionary riots, labor and production, human existence, and social justice. Without a clear beginning or end, the work suggests a cycle and the non-linear nature of history, and, by extension, life and death.
Navigating relationships among words, images, and languages, Tsang Kin-Wah’s text-based work span various media: wall prints, silkscreen, and digital video projections. His wallpaper prints usually feature beautiful floral patterns that recall the swirls of nineteenth-century decorative wallpapers. However, upon closer inspection, details reveal the patterns to be composed of text in both English and Chinese characters. Their provocative and sometimes offensive meanings mock art, the art market, the artist and his Chinese ethnicity, as well as other broader culture issues. In 2009, Tsang began experimenting with new media and produced The Seven Seals , an ongoing series of digital video installation works that takes its name from the New Testament’s Book of Revelation. Tsang’s practice allows a range of interpretations and encourages viewers to search the relationship between image and text, between pictographic and phonetic writing systems.
Unregistered City is a series of eight photographs depicting different scenes of a vacant, apparently post-apocalyptic city: Some are covered by dust and others are submerged by water...
In Dilemma: Three Way Fork in the Road , Wang references Peking opera in a re-interpretation of traditional text...
In the video installation A Gust of Wind , Zhang continues to explore notions of perspective and melds them seamlessly with a veiled but incisive social critique...
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...
A mesmerizing experience of a vaguely familiar yet remote world, History of Chemistry I follows a group of men as they wander from somewhere beyond the edge of the sea through a vast landscape to an abandoned steel factory...
The image of rusted nails, nuts and bolts as shrapnel sandwiched between a fried Chicken burger highlights the contrast between decadence and destruction...
State Terrorism in the ultimate form of Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood features a portrait of the artist wearing a zipped utilitarian jacket reminiscent of a worker’s uniform, with one arm behind his back as if forced to ingest a bundle of stick—a literal portrayal to the definition of fascism...
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...
Although seemingly unadorned at first glance, Yang Xinguang’s sculptural work Phenomena (2009) employs minimalist aesthetics as a means of gesturing towards the various commonalities and conflicts between civilization and the natural world...
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...