Emerging Chinese installation artist Tozer Pak Sheung Chuen at Venice Biennale 2009

VENICE BIENNALE HONG KONG

The award-winning young conceptual artist Tozer Pak Sheung Chuen will represent Hong Kong at the 53rd Venice Biennale (June to November 2009) with an exhibition of newly-created works and past works which will focus on the two themes of Hong Kong and cultural alienation .

The exhibition called  “Making (Perfect) World: Harbour, Hong Kong, Alienated Cities and Dreams” is curated by Mr Tobias Berger, formerly curator of Hong Kong’s Para/Site and now curator at the Nam Jun Paik Art Center in Korea.

Tozer Pak Sheung Chuen works

His highly original and playful works often provoke a sense of surprise and curiosity. In recent works he enjoys numbers, words and the spaces between them. He likes to provoke serendipitous happenings and to explore the unknown and non-existent.

Tozer Pak Sheung Chuen, The Half Folded Library, Guangdong Art Museum

One of the most intriguing works by this artist which was created during his residency in New York and exhibited at the 3rd Guangzhou Triennial 2008, involved secretly folding page 22 in 15,500 books in the Ottendorfer Branch Public Library in New York.

Tozer Pak Sheung Chuen, 2008 film 2008, film installation

In an exhibition currently showing at the Nam Jun Paik Art Center in Singapore ‘The First Stop on the Super Highway” Tozer Pak explores space/time with film in his film installation ‘2008 film 2008’.

“In a film, 1 second is 24 frames. Each frame is a picture. But when you watch 1 second of film, you are not only watching 24 frames of pictures. You also watch the blank spaces (the black bars) between the frames. We see the light, but we can’t see the darkness.

I cut out all the blank spaces from a film. And then, I join all these blank spaces back together into another “film”(a black film). This “film” is then projected on the wall by a film-projector. Through this process we are able to watch the “invisible part” of a film, the time that is traditionally considered inexistent.

The proportion of blank space and picture space in a frame (of that Hong Kong film) is 7:13. The “black film” on the wall and the film in the machine are both 383cm, and were cut from 23 seconds of film. During the exhibition this film will be shown on the first fifth minute of every hour. (Pak Sheung Chuen) note 1

Information about and images of his earlier works which explore height and politics can be found on Tozer Pak’s gallery on Hong Kong Art Web.

Biography of Tozer Pak Sheung Chuen

Pak Sheung Chuen is a young conceptual and performance artist who was born in 1977 in Fujian and immigrated to Hong Kong in 1984, . Pak graduated from the Chinese University of Hong Kong in 2002 with a major in fine arts and a minor in theology. He has exhibited at, among others, The 3rd Yokohama Triennial (2008), The 3rd Guangzhou Triennial (2008), ‘China Power Station: Part 2′ and Inward Gazes – Documentaries of Chinese Performance Art’ Macao Museum of Art (2005). In 2006, he was awarded the Lee Hysan Foundation Fellowship of Asian Cultural Council and joined ISCP residency program in New York.note 2

Notes:

1. Tozer Pak sat Nam Jun Paik Art Center First Stop on the Super Highway
2. Tozer Pak Sheung Chuen residency at Asia Art Archive

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