Mak Ying Tung 2 (b. 1989, Hong Kong) is a conceptual artist. Her work contemplates 21st century issues through the study of philosophy, art history, culture, shifting socio-political environments, the Internet, and new technology. The aesthetic experience she crafts is bound by the dualism of humor and intense inquisitiveness. She creates, installations, paintings, drawings, video work, youtube videos, stand up comedy routines, and Instagram filters.
Her iconic Home Sweet Home (2019-) series are triptychs on canvas that make use of the popular American life simulation video game “the Sims” and are each painted by three separate painters on the Chinese e-commerce platform Taobao. She uses “the Sims” as a virtual construction tool for her ideas of both utopia and dystopia in the context of Hong Kong. In the game she creates bizarre environments such as bedrooms filled with CCTV cameras, lonely millennial hangout spots, and pools on roofs filled with flowers. She takes screen-captures of these digital fantasies and divides the resultant images into thirds. Each third is subsequently painted by a separate painter found on Taobao, who is given as little instruction as possible. Through fracturing the process of production and allowing external factors to intervene in the actualisation of her artwork, Mak 2’s Home Sweet Home series not only elucidates the inevitable disparity between fantasy and reality, it also crafts a comment on authorship, “copy-cat” culture, and the complex narratives that construct her understanding of home.