Pak Sheung Chuen

Performance artist Pak Sheung Chuen (白双全) alters and destabilizes everyday life in an effort to reveal the structures that gird our personal lives. Pak’s work questions the possibility of individual identity within Asian megacities and contemporary globalized society. He is particularly influenced by the United Kingdom’s transfer of Hong Kong sovereignty to China in 1997. His 2009 work Breathing into a House involved the artist collecting his breath in plastic bags while living in a small apartment. After 10 days, the air-filled bags filled the space, rendering it uninhabitable. Pak later said he felt as if the apartment had absorbed his life, as though he had become his own exhalations. Many of his works, including Breathing into a House, can be considered self-experiments, as they rarely involve an audience.