Taipei Biennial 2012

Pak Sheung Chuen’s playful work slyly alters the experience of everyday life. He explores, on the one hand, the mental and social “space” between everything that is structured, routine, and stable in our world, and on the other, he investigates coincidence, chance encounters, the arbitrary, and the imaginative. In so doing, he reveals artistic moments in everyday life and brings to the fore the interwoven nature of reality and the imaginary. He prefers to use himself and his writings as a medium, conceiving his works as actions or subtle manipulations of the regular course of events. In most cases these performative actions have no audience; rather, they consist of journeys and self-experiments that engage with ever-changing environments. 

In an earlier work called Waiting for a Friend (Without Appointment), Pak went to the Hong Kong Airport waiting area and waited until someone he knew walked out. He has also created a large permanent installation in the New York Public Library. In this project, the artist folded page twenty-two of every second book in the library. Another work consisted of a five-day trip to Malaysia, during which he kept his eyes closed the whole time; he took pictures so he could discover the country after he returned home. A similar project is Alternative Tokyo Travel Project 2: Valley’s Trip (2007), for which the artist travelled from southern to northern Tokyo by walking only in the areas corresponding to the middle folds of his map. For his project Going Home for the Taipei Biennial 2010, Pak looked for people in the TFAM lobby who would allow him to accompany them to their homes.

His work in the Taipei Biennial 2012, Taipei Notes: 2011.11.19–2011.11.28 is part of the L (Phase I), which consists of ideas and observations systematically written down in notebooks—a collection of “artistic gestures,” the everyday birth of artistic “fictions.” The notes come from a trip to Taipei that he undertook in November 2011 and are presented as text on the windows facing the internal courtyard of the museum.

Pak Sheung Chuen, born 1977 in China, lives and works in Hong Kong