*Bok-
1a space
In a show that sets out to redefine the book, one could be forgiven for expecting some playful experimentation with the form. Yet only a few of the works engage with the medium of the book directly.
Michael Lee Hong Hwee's $100,000 Gallery of Art gets to the point of redefining the book more than any other piece in the show. The Singaporean artist researches the Singapore Art Gallery, a project proposed in the 1950s but never realised, representing it in a set of four books whose pages are cut up and folded in a merger of bindery with architectural modelling.
Huang Xiaopeng wittily challenges the reliability of translation by showcasing eight different translations of Karl Marx's Communist Manifesto. Huang translates the original German-language text using an online translation tool, rendering the work unintelligible.
Jeff Leung Chin-fung's works are rooted in Hong Kong and Chinese history. In Imprint, he juxtaposes two metal engravings on the gallery wall, with one of them showing erroneous information from Zhu Qi's History of Hong Kong Fine Arts, and the other showing news from local paper Wen Wei Po on the bloody Tiananmen Square crackdown of June 4, 1989.