The oldest idea in my work, and the one I keep returning to: that a work of art isn't finished by the person who makes it. It's completed by the person who looks. A face on a screen, a crowd in a square, a cadaver in a Rembrandt — each becomes its real subject only through the attention brought to it. These are pieces about that act, and what it asks of us.
I've always been struck by Rembrandt's The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Tulp — not for its cadaver, but for the way the act of looking transforms the onlookers into the painting's real subjects. Here I trace that idea from the painting to my own KMA installation, Strange Attractors, and to what still fascinates me: how simply looking, or being looked at, can turn a viewer into the viewed.
What gives the Mona Lisa its grip on us — and could that same pull live in the face of a stranger? Starting from da Vinci's enigmatic gaze, this piece traces empathy back to a single human impulse: the urge to read what's behind another's eyes. It introduces People We Love, an installation that turns that act of imagining into the artwork itself — unsaleable, unreproducible, made anew in each viewer.
A silent installation of strangers' faces, each looking straight ahead, telling half a story the viewer must complete by stepping up to meet their gaze. In this catalogue essay, Professor Jenna Ng reflects on People We Love as storytelling at its most abstract and democratic — and on what that wordless exchange reveals about being human together.
Between 2005 and 2017, KMA's interactive installations chased one radical question: can you stage a compelling theatrical event where there's no line between performer and audience? Only Congregation came close. Now, in an age of AI, that question feels newly urgent — and a fresh collaboration is reopening it.