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west-facing window of the Red Box room, as Pak intended, while finding ideal light conditions
proved more challenging in some of the building-locked high-rise libraries in China. Indeed, at the
Hangzhou Public Library, the work found its place on the ceiling skylight, creating a new visual
dynamic.
The project is not Pak’s first intervention into library spaces. Indeed, his permanent ‘solo
exhibition’ at New York’s 58th Street Branch Library,
Page 22 (Half Folded Library)
was created by
the folding of the twenty-second page of every second book in the library’s collection. In that work,
as in
Making Thousands of Suns
, Pak attempts to reframe the contrasting dynamics of intimacy and
institutional alienation experienced in the public library environment, in favour of his fine-tuned
sense of the social and the poetic.
