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Lot Essay
Spanning over two meters long, Home Sweet Home: Mak in Pool 2 is one of the triptychs conceived by Hong Kong-born and based conceptual artist Mak Ying Tung (aka MAK2). It is part of her pivotal series Home Sweet Home that debuted in 2019. Using popular American life simulation video game ‘The Sims’ as her starting point, Mak designed and constructed her surreal scenarios in home settings with nonsensical and bizarre props and elements, which the virtual game would render flawlessly. The artist then transcribes her fantasied scenes onto the canvases not by her own hands, but by three anonymous painters she commissioned through the Chinese e-commerce platform Taobao. Each painter was given limited instructions to paint one-third of the scene, making the final triptych impossible to be perfectly matched. Through rupturing the production process and enabling external factors to participate in the realisation of her ‘home’, Mak’s Home Sweet Home series not only annotates the discrepancy between fantasy and reality, but also poses questions on authorship and the ‘Shanzhai’ (copycat) culture in China.
In Home Sweet Home: Mak in Pool 2, the avatar of Mak is floating in a swimming pool filled with blossom roses at a penthouse—a setting that symbolises wealth and simultaneously projects a desirable life that social media, TV, and the Internet are feeding consumers every day—a dream to keep individuals strive for a better life and social status. The subtle disparity of the composition between canvases indicates that reality may never live up to our fantasy. Albeit Mak continues to develop the Home Sweet Home series and later incorporates Fengshui elements into it, the present work was made in 2020—a year when Hong Kong was still in the aftermath of political unrest. Born in 1989, Mak graduated from the School of Creative Media, City University of Hong Kong in 2013. Her practice is versatile and contemplates contemporary issues through her cross-disciplinary works including installation, performance, painting and occasional stand-up comedy. In 2018, she decisively added the ‘2’ to her name after a Fengshui master consultation, in the hope of gaining fame and fortune by having a perfect number of strokes in her Chinese name. This year, Mak is the subject of an exhibition Love Pool at Peres Project in Berlin and her works have been collected by M+, Hong Kong; X Museum, Beijing; and UBS Art Collection, New York, among others.
In Home Sweet Home: Mak in Pool 2, the avatar of Mak is floating in a swimming pool filled with blossom roses at a penthouse—a setting that symbolises wealth and simultaneously projects a desirable life that social media, TV, and the Internet are feeding consumers every day—a dream to keep individuals strive for a better life and social status. The subtle disparity of the composition between canvases indicates that reality may never live up to our fantasy. Albeit Mak continues to develop the Home Sweet Home series and later incorporates Fengshui elements into it, the present work was made in 2020—a year when Hong Kong was still in the aftermath of political unrest. Born in 1989, Mak graduated from the School of Creative Media, City University of Hong Kong in 2013. Her practice is versatile and contemplates contemporary issues through her cross-disciplinary works including installation, performance, painting and occasional stand-up comedy. In 2018, she decisively added the ‘2’ to her name after a Fengshui master consultation, in the hope of gaining fame and fortune by having a perfect number of strokes in her Chinese name. This year, Mak is the subject of an exhibition Love Pool at Peres Project in Berlin and her works have been collected by M+, Hong Kong; X Museum, Beijing; and UBS Art Collection, New York, among others.