Pak Sheung Chuen
Nightmare Wallpaper (No.STC2360-15/a), 2016 (detail; left)
Wallpaper with framed document, drawings, photographs
The work consists of three parts: the wallpaper per se, whose elegant motifs cover a purple background, a text written by the artist himself that relates the context of a court case which took place during Occupy Central in Hong Kong, and a photograph of the defendant taken from a video still of a local TV news report.
Pak Sheung Chuen
Two Rainwater Pools 2006-8-5, Warsaw, 2006 (detail; center)
inkjet prints on paper on dibond, 4 parts
The photographs depict two rainwater pools on an expanse of asphalt. The artist subsequently transferred water from the larger pool into the smaller, thus changing the relative size of the two rainwater accumulations. To him, the outlines of the puddles recalled the shape of countries on a map and therefore the changed sizes also alluded to a change in the relative balance of power.
Pak Sheung Chuen
12 Vertical Tree Trunks And A Slanted Forest, 2017 (right)
12 pine tree trunks
Cut diagonally, the grain of the wood is, anti-intuitively, perpendicular. The disjunction introduced by this paradoxical appearance may allude to an increasingly fraught relationship in politics between appearance and essence.
Photo © Andrea Rossetti