Black Square Series examines how a single form can accumulate meaning across time, context, and personal history. Taking Kazimir Malevich’s Black Square (1915) as a point of departure, the series repositions this radical gesture within contemporary conditions, where questions of control, authorship, and belonging remain unsettled. What began as Malevich’s refusal of representation becomes, here, an active insertion: a geometric presence placed into landscapes, cities, and imagined terrains. Across the works, the black square operates less as an image than as a condition—interrupting, obscuring, or asserting itself within environments that otherwise suggest continuity. It is at once a void and a force.
The series is grounded in the political and visual language of the 2019–2020 Hong Kong pro-democracy protests, which began in response to the Hong Kong government’s proposed amendments to the Fugitive Offenders Ordinance, a bill that would have allowed extradition to mainland China. During these demonstrations, black became a collective signal of anonymity, solidarity, and resistance, transforming the visual atmosphere of the city. That context also sits within a longer history of political unease, including the 2011 disappearance and subsequent detention of Ai Weiwei, the internationally recognised Chinese artist and civil rights activist, who was held for more than eighty days without public disclosure of his whereabouts.
These events are not external references but part of the conditions that shaped my own sense of home. Hong Kong—my childhood home—was, during my early life, a British colony governed by the rule of law, yet always lived under the defining reality of its return to Chinese sovereignty in 1997. For many of my generation, that transition was not a retrospective historical fact but a condition we were born into and grew up with. As a Chinese family, my parents prepared for that future by ensuring I was born in the United States. Later, in 2011, growing concerns about instability in the region contributed to their move to Singapore. That movement, and the conditions surrounding it, form part of my ongoing exploration of instability, displacement, and how a sense of home is made under uncertain ground.
Material choices further extend this framework. The use of Stuart Semple’s Black 2.0 (2017)—developed in response to Anish Kapoor’s exclusive artistic rights to Vantablack in 2016—introduces a parallel discourse around access, ownership, and artistic control. Here, the politics of colour itself becomes inseparable from the work, reinforcing the idea that control can operate at both symbolic and material levels.
Across the series, the black square is tested against different conditions: urban density, remote landscapes, organic systems, and constructed environments. In some works, it destabilises; in others, it imposes. At times it reads as absence, at others as pressure. What unites the series is an ongoing negotiation between control and freedom—between forces that seek to define, contain, or dominate, and those that resist fixation. Rather than resolving these tensions, The Black Square Series holds them in place. The works ask what it means to situate oneself within systems—political, cultural, and environmental—that are constantly shifting, and whether it is possible to inhabit them without being fully determined by them.