The Black Square Series examines how a single form can accumulate meaning across time, context, and shifting conditions. Taking Kazimir Malevich’s Black Square (1915) as a point of departure, the series repositions this radical gesture within contemporary contexts, where questions of control, stability, authorship, and belonging remain unsettled. What began as Malevich’s refusal of representation becomes, here, an active insertion: a geometric presence placed into landscapes, cities, and imagined terrains.

Developed in response to a broader climate of political instability in the three countries (the US, the UK, and Hong Kong) I consider partially as home, the series draws from a period in which existing structures of governance, identity, and authority appeared increasingly strained. Across the works, the black square operates less as an image than as a condition — interrupting, obscuring, or asserting itself within environments that otherwise suggest continuity. It is at once a void and a force.

The visual language of the 2019–2020 Hong Kong pro-democracy protests is particularly present, where black functioned as a collective signal of anonymity, solidarity, and resistance. Within this context, the black square becomes both a marker of presence and a site of tension—holding together questions of visibility, control, and erasure.

Material choices further extend this framework. The use of Stuart Semple’s Black 2.0 (2017)—developed in response to Anish Kapoor’s exclusive artistic rights to Vantablack (2016)—introduces a parallel discourse around access, ownership, and artistic control. The politics of colour itself becomes inseparable from the work, reinforcing the idea that control can operate at both symbolic and material levels.

Across the series, the black square is set against different contexts: urban density, remote landscapes, organic systems, and constructed environments. In some works, it destabilises; in others, it imposes. At times it reads as absence, at others as pressure. What unites the series is an ongoing negotiation between control and freedom—between forces that seek to define, contain, or dominate, and those that resist fixation. Rather than resolving these tensions, The Black Square Series holds them in place. The works ask what it means to situate oneself within systems that are in flux, and whether it is possible to inhabit them without being fully determined by them.