Pak relaxes on the sofa of his and his wife’s green motif living room. From the southern facing balcony, Tseung Kwan O Village across the way remains hidden from view behind the hill in the distance, except for a single telephone tower, not pictured here. Pak refers to the recent addition to the landscape as the local Eiffel Tower, and commemorates it with a miniature statue in one of the flower pots.
When we arrived, Pak had been editing scans of blank spreads on the living room television screen from the project White Library / A Mind Reaching for Emptiness (2009) that he began in his 2008 residency with AsiaArtArchive. Here, he takes a break to show us some travel photos.
Having grown up in a family of seven, Pak is used to working in small living quarters. When Pak is not working in the public realm or in his living area, he is here in a cramped storage room, where he keeps an inaccessible, makeshift bookshelf behind tubs filled with stacks of Ming Pao newspapers, to which he contributes regularly, and exhibition documentation.
A photo shows Pak’s installation of plastic bags Breathing in a House (2006) filling an apartment in Busan, Korea, which he recreated for the 2009 Venice Biennale.
Next to the kitchen and opposite the entrance to Pak’s home, hangs an oversized print of a grocery receipt. Pak tells the story of how, after purchasing grocery items on an unspectacular day in 2003, he noticed that in his hand he held a premonitory message. By an uncanny happenstance, the second character on each line of the receipt read from top to bottom, “Be considerate to other people, gain eternal life.” Pak calls it Miracle of $132.30.
The unexpected charm of the supermarket fortune inspired Pak to purchase a gift for his wife of four books, the first character of whose titles when stacked together read “I am thinking of you.”
Artist monographs take up half of the living room bookshelves. Placed on the second tier of the corner shelf is The Horizon Placed at Home (2004), another work Pak exhibited at Venice, for which he bottled water from five locations off Victoria Harbour to create a personal sea view.
A painting by Pak, which he made in his second year at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, shows two parallel standing spire-like trees, a small four legged animal and a freestanding doorway on a white geometrical plane. While Pak no longer paints, similar forms of trees and quirky animals and the same feeling of the “nearness of death” inspired by Swiss sculptor Alberto Giacometti and Italian still life painter Giorgio Morandi, continue to make their appearances in Pak’s work.
Because of a lack of studio space, the majority of Pak’s day-to-day production these days takes the form of small sketches in a drawing pad.
Pak posts his sketchbook entries on his personal blog: http://www.oneeyeman.blogspot.com/
Before we leave, Pak takes time with us to admire the wall of ivy behind his building and the outdoor altar at the parking lot turn in.
