Untitled

“Untitled” is a single digital art piece reproduced in Where Else: An International Hong Kong Poetry Anthology, created by Vancouver and Hong Kong-based artist Lam Tung Pang. Drawn in Vancouver during the COVID-19 lockdown, the piece echoes the artist’s personal experience of being confined to his home with his family for two years. The cartoonish style of the human figure reflects the artist’s inspiration from children’s books. The figure lacks hair and skin tone, bearing only basic facial features represented by lines and dots, which when paired with the abstract background of monochrome brush strokes and negative space, allows viewers to imagine themselves as the character and project their experiences onto the artwork. Similarly, the artist gave the artwork an ambiguous title as he did not wish to impose meaning on the artwork, instead encouraging viewers to define it themselves.

The picture shows a nude, burly figure staring at a dark blob on their arm with their brows furrowed, as they keep their hand on the blob. The dark blob is in stark contrast to the white and light gray skin tone of the figure, recalling the juxtaposition between dirt and cleanliness. Although the blob is featureless and open to interpretation, it could be understood as a washcloth stained with dirt after wiping the body, so parts of the figure are colourless, or in this interpretation, cleaned by the washcloth. The blob could also be a chunk of dirt that the figure is trying to remove. Both interpretations illustrate cleaning and removing dirt from one’s body, a widespread experience during the pandemic as personal hygiene was emphasized to defend from COVID-19. The figure’s furrowed brows could imply attentiveness or anxiety regarding the dark blob. One interpretation is that the figure is focused on washing themselves; another is their anxiety about the dirt on their body, both of which highlight the increased importance of cleanliness and anxiety about COVID-19 contamination during the pandemic. Another feature of the picture that highlights the anxiety around dirt is the dark background which seems to be encroaching on the figure, illustrating the impression of COVID-19’s ubiquity. The narrow space that the dark background leaves for the figure evokes a sense of claustrophobia, representing the difficulty of isolating in a small, shared living environment and the absence of privacy and personal space.

Lam’s piece embodies the visual narrative of keeping clean, isolation, and yet a lack of space, which are pandemic experiences that many viewers are sure to resonate with. His abstract style and the figure’s lack of identifying features make it possible for viewers to interpret the picture using their memories of the pandemic, which in turn underscores a degree of universality to pandemic experiences stemming from the pandemic’s transcendence of geographical and cultural boundaries. As a digital piece created during the pandemic, it speaks to the act of artistic expression to cope with lockdown, and how digital art tools allowed artists to keep creating without the need to purchase supplies outside of home.