Artwork
《失焦》 Out of Focus
Projector lights, recycled plastic bottles, mirror
Size variable
#塑造生命 #誰說綿羊是人畜無害 #失焦還是聚焦
Artist
Tsui Chee Yee
Chee Yee graduated from the Graphic Design Department at London College of Communication. After returning to Hong Kong, he co-founded &dear with his cousin to promote environmental and animal conservation messages through various art media.
Over the years, he has collaborated with multiple animal organizations (such as WWF, Green Power, OPCF, HKDR, and Shark Savers), designing key visuals, exhibitions, installation art, and other materials for diverse events and activities.
Artist's Statement
In an era where everyone has a smartphone,
each person brings their own narrative angle.
Hollow posts and shallow replies on screens
are like disposable plastic bottles—
picked up casually, discarded without a thought.
Amid countless perspectives, a fog envelops everything.
Big data, through the filter called “self,”
seeks conformity and rejects difference,
narrowing what was once a vast field of vision.
We seek to understand an event more fully through others’ eyes,
yet end up using others to affirm our own preconceptions.
When you think everyone’s aligned in one direction—
focusing on a single point—
you return to the original blur.
Creation Concept
To learn about Tainan, I turned to online searches like most people, but found endless similar content from countless creators. In this content-saturated world, comments seemed promising—yet their low barrier lets casual remarks and clickbait flood big data. We hunt for matching views to affirm our biases, dismissing dissent amid the noise.
The installation combines AI illustrations and upcycled plastic bottle sculptures. AI generates a fictional Tainan-Hong Kong hybrid city from web data and my Hong Konger preconceptions. Bottles represent disposable online content; a sheep surrounded by them embodies herd mentality—sheep have unexpectedly complex emotions and intelligence per recent studies, yet their masses threaten wildlife. Projections onto the sheep and distorted bottles cast fragmented images on walls: the “lead sheep’s” curated reality, burying the authentic view.
Beyond online distortion of places, it probes a self/big data world: do we discover truth, or just algorithmically shaped echoes?
