IF he weren’t an artist, Hong Kong’s Pak Sheung-Chuen might be considered mad. He’s taken a trip to Malaysia blindfolded, waited hours for a friend who didn’t know he was meant to meet Pak in the first place, and spent a month folding pages in more than 15000 books at the New York Public Library.  Melody Thomas spoke to the artist, who’s on residency in Wellington.
THE 2003 SARS epidemic gave Hong Kong artist Pak Sheung-Chuen his first break into the art world. Pak’s piece 3692 was inspired by the realisation that, once removed, plastic sheets over security keypads allowing access to apartments bore the imprint of the building’s access number – and so a measure taken to protect the health of a nation was possibly endangering them in other ways. 3692 caught the eye of local paper Ming Pao, who got him onboard as a columnist, requiring him to submit a piece of art every week.
“Every day I just go in to the city; the streets or the supermarket or the book store… I walk slowly and I jot down ideas,’” he says.
From this period came works like To share a watermelon with an unknown person; where Pak bought a pre-halved watermelon from the supermarket, and then pondered the identity of the missing person eating the other half; A Little Flower for the Passer-by, where five coins were organised into flower shapes and left on a street corner for those in need; and Miracle of $132.30, where a receipt from the supermarket was found to carry a secret biblical message when every second character was read; “Whoever believes in him should… have eternal life.”
“Every day we think of as the same, which is really boring… If you slow down, you can make your everyday life a miracle,” he says.
While Pak benefited from Ming Pao’s extensive circulation, his use of the press as a medium meant many didn’t take him seriously. Then in 2005, A Little Flower for the Passer-by won a prize at the Inward Gazes exhibition at Macao Museum of Art, and Pak made connections with some influential supporters.
Following exhibitions at the Third Guangzhou Triennial and the Yokohama Triennale, plus a yearlong residency in New York, Pak represented Hong Kong at the Venice Biennale in 2009, and has since managed to make a living solely as an artist.
Pak is living in a cottage at the edge of Bolton cemetery for a month as part of the Wellington Asia Residency Exchange (WARE).
He says the differences between his hometown, with a population density of 16,576 people per square mile, to Wellington, at 2,273 people per square mile, are stark.
“The first thing is the sense of space. [This cottage] is very big, but it’s for just one person. They always ask me, ‘Do you think it’s too small for you?’ but in Hong Kong this house would be for a whole family,” he says.
“In Hong Kong I always need to tell myself ‘slow down’. People here are a little bit slower. I think slower is better for me; it makes things more detailed, and makes you more enjoy the time you have.”
Pak’s still getting used to the differences between Hong Kong and New Zealand people.
“In Hong Kong there are too many people, so the individual loses character. In New Zealand, always when I’m walking in the street, people are smiling at me, and sometimes they talk to me. They see I’m eating sushi, and they say, “Oh the sushi is really nice, isn’t it? That to me is very strange,” he says.
All these observations will likely tie into Pak’s current project – to develop a New Zealand-inspired piece for The Dowse’s new exhibition Crystal City; for which many of his older works will also be on display.  
For one of his instalments, Pak recommends you bring your own digital camera. A Travel Without Visual Experience is a photo exhibition displayed in a pitch black room – where the only way to view the pictures is to snap them with your own camera, and see them retrospectively. To make the piece, Pak went on a tour of Malaysia blindfolded, taking photos along the way, to explore the distance between the eye and the body; and the relationship between vision and memory.
“I don’t want to just show the images, I want to give the viewer the experience. [When you take a photo] the flash appears for one moment, and then it’s gone. The memory inside your brain is very similar to when I was in Malaysia,” he says.
For 2008 piece, Measuring the Size of the Sea Storing in a Library, Pak searched out books with the sea on their cover at the New York Library, and then connected them up in a circle to measure the size of the sea contained in that space.
Pak returns to Hong Kong at the end of July for a residency in old town; working on a public art project about TV culture. It’s a random life he leads, but Pak’s adamant we can all easily inject a little magic into our days.
“That’s the most beautiful part of my artwork – you can do it too.”
Crystal City, The Dowse Art Museum, July 16 – October 16.