Contrary to the popular stereotype of the suffering and starving artist, Pak has not faced too many hardships in his career. In fact, he considers himself the luckiest artist in Hong Kong. Pak graduated from the Department of Fine Arts at the Chinese University Fine Arts in 2002. The pressure to find work was put on hold by the outbreak of SARS soon after.
In any case, he was given a visual arts column in the Sunday supplement of the Ming Pao newspaper. Pak says the column is a platform to do what he really wants to do, which is to tell ordinary people about the beauty in everyday life. In it, Pak presents his conceptual art on the printed page, with a few lines explaining what he is doing and why.
His refreshing take on the ordinary things in everyday life could be what has attracted so many people to his work – Pak’s column drew a lot of attention right from the beginning.
“I twist a little bit of what I see in life and take one more step to give new meanings to the ordinary,” he says.
Pak further explains that there are usually two approaches artists use to deal with the relationship between art and life, “Some [artists] try to incorporate life as one of the elements in their artworks, which will prompt the audience to associate it with life. But in fact there’s actually no relationship between the two.”
“Others try to incorporate the elements of art into daily life. What they present are not artworks, but simply a desire they have to make life better,” he says.
Pak adds, “I consider myself as belonging to the latter group.’’
