Chingsum Jessye Luk

Chingsum Jessye Luk - PS (58,080 px)

Technique: India ink on paper

Artist Biography: The work of Chingsum Jessye Luk (Hong Kong, 1982; lives and works in Zurich) addresses the limits of the artistic and its relationship to the everyday, a meditation on the evolution of time, memory, perception and language. The artist collects small and simple objects from everyday life, and her interest lies in monotonous and repetitive gestures. From the found objects, the work reflects her obsessive need to collect the everyday, measure, count, accumulate, catalog, inventory and modify it in a methodical, sometimes pseudo-scientific way. His work is a study of the cyclical and infinite nature of time, an exercise in discipline, a praise of the trivial, a tribute to boredom. In 2019, Chingsum Jessye Luk received the artistic scholarship of the city of Zurich, which consisted of a 6-month residency in Paris.

 

The work is part of the project "Potentially Seditious", where Chingsum Jessye Luk makes a deliberate effort to make the text unreadable, having written all the elements of the censored text. Deconstructed slogans from the protest movement in Hong Kong. The artist has transcribed the binary code of a photo of censored slogans written on paper. Therefore, the piece consists only of 1's and 0's, or vertical strokes and circles. The written slogan and the photo were destroyed upon completion of the work, as well as the digital file of the binary code. After Hong Kong's national security law was passed in 2020, certain slogans or words could be considered seditious and people who display or utter them in public could be arrested and prosecuted as they are considered a threat to national security. The origin of the series stems from reflections on censorship, as the only way to express the words used in the piece is by making them illegible and hiding them. On the other hand, it also constitutes an investigation on the abstraction created from words and writing.