Drawing on Zhang Huan’s To Add One Meter to an Anonymous Mountain (1995), this work explores how collective presence can alter both physical and symbolic landscapes. The painting reflects on the body as a site of inscription—where meaning is constructed through accumulation, pressure, and shared action.
The work also responds to the cultural and political context surrounding Zhang Huan’s practice, including the experimental artist community at Yuanmingyuan in the early 1990s, and to the visual language of the 2019 Hong Kong pro-democracy protests, in which collective bodily presence became a form of political visibility. I was also thinking of the human chains formed across Hong Kong during the protests, including those seen around Lion Rock in 2019, where the body became both message and material.
Within this context, the black square operates as a point of interruption—an insertion that questions scale, authorship, and the limits of transformation.
