Installation video featuring the Maps & Cuts exhibition at Hurong Lou Gallery, Philadelphia, 2005.
Maps & Cuts
In the project Maps & Cuts, imagery oscillates between mechanical and biomorphic hybrids, suspended over antique maps and technical drawings—icons of industrial progress as well as political and cultural colonialism. These layered compositions interrogate systems of control, cartography, and the human impulse to divide, label, and possess.
At its core, the project challenges conventional systems of value within the contemporary art market. While artworks are routinely subjected to critique, evaluation, and commodification, the public rarely plays a role in the decision-making processes that determine their fate. Maps & Cuts subverts this passivity by inviting—or implicating—the audience in an irreversible act: the literal resizing, detaching, or tearing of the artwork. This intervention permanently alters the piece, shifting the viewer’s role from passive observer to active participant, even aggressor. In doing so, the project confronts the politics of authorship, ownership, and destruction, forcing a reckoning with the consequences of participation.
