☞*Mak2*☜

All works © mak2 2024

A continuation of her ongoing series, Home Sweet Home: Feng Shui Painting is a sub-series of triptychs on canvas, composed using the popular American life simulation game “The Sims”, with each panel of an artwork painted by a different painter found on the Chinese e-commerce platform Taobao. Using elements of the videogame, Mak2 stages bizarre but idyllic environments that reflect her home city, Hong Kong, projecting into it the unreachable fantasies of real life. She then asks a Fengshui master for spiritual consultation regarding the colors, décor, and positioning of each digital composition. Having optimized the Fengshui, the virtual homescapes are then screen captured, divided into thirds, and sent to separate painters. As the imagery is materialized via paint and brush through the hands of three strangers, the final triptych becomes unpredictable owing to the painters’ inconsistent skill levels, techniques, and use of materials.

 

The added element of Fengshui in this new sub-series explores the idealization of home through the lens of superstition. By allowing a Fengshui master to intervene in a place as intimate as home, the artist implies the notion of belief over one’s liking. While the original series forms a commentary on the ineluctable disparity between fantasy and reality, the use of superstition in the new paintings speaks to the influence of faith over perception. Utilizing Fengshui properties applicable to both the virtual environments and their resulting triptychs, the artworks are believed to bring good fortune to the exhibition.

 

Staged amid the paintings, in the center of the gallery, are two isolated islands fully furnished with beds, nightstands, lamps, rugs, and faux wood flooring, collectively construct two cinematic installations in manifestations of ideal bedrooms as imagined by the artist. In the works, Mak2 compares predictive analysis to fortune-telling. Seemly different, the authorities of science and theology respectively represent in the artworks both attempt to foresee the future by building upon existing information.