Mak2, Home Sweet Home Backyard: Golden House 1, 2025, Oil and acrylic on canvas, triptych, and video game, 55 1/2 × 98 2/5 in | 141 × 250 cm
In Home Sweet Home Backyard: Golden House, Mak2 takes the commodification of art to its logical, if absurd, extreme. This latest series, debuting at Art Basel Hong Kong, comprises seven unique triptychs on canvas, each tethered to a custom-built video game. The mechanics are deceptively simple: players navigate a virtual world to mine gold, and the in-game yield translates into real-time price adjustments of the corresponding physical artwork. For every tranche of virtual gold unearthed, the value of the associated painting increases by 5%, with a maximum cap of 20% over the course of the fair.
The more you play, the more it costs.
Mak2’s integration of game mechanics into the art market is neither gimmick nor satire: it’s a lucid, disarming demonstration of how value is constructed, manipulated, and performed in contemporary art. By converting player engagement into monetary inflation, the artist literalizes speculation and exposes its artifice. The game, in this case, is the market, looped back into itself with the elegance of a recursive script.
Born in Hong Kong in 1989, Mak2 has long been preoccupied with the interplay between control and chaos, authorship and delegation, reality and simulation. Her Home Sweet Home series, ongoing since 2019, exemplifies this tension. Built within The Sims, a ubiquitous American life simulation game, these digital dioramas, often populated by surveillance equipment, rooftop flower pools, or the ghostly residue of millennial malaise, are screen-captured and divided into thirds. Each segment is then outsourced to a different painter found via Taobao, China's sprawling e-commerce platform. By relinquishing authorial control and diffusing artistic labor, Mak2 creates intentional dissonance, emphasizing the structural fractures between image and intention, labor and capital, original and copy.
With Golden House, she pushes this strategy further, making economic feedback not just a subtext but a formal mechanism of the work itself. The audience is no longer merely a passive viewer but an active co-producer of market value. The artwork performs itself through transaction.
Mak2’s practice extends far beyond painting and simulation. Her 2017 work You Better Watch Out—a chaotic assemblage of snow globes, QR codes, bouncing balls, and CCTV cameras was included in the exhibition .com/.cn, co-presented by MoMA PS1 and the K11 Art Foundation. It drew a sharp line between entertainment and surveillance, between participation and control. That duality - now commonplace in the infrastructures of the internet - suffuses much of her work.
Mak2’s exhibitions include The Principle of Hope (Inside-Out Art Museum, Beijing, 2021), We Didn't Mean To Break It (But It’s OK, We Can Fix It) (Pedro Cera, Lisbon, 2019), Invisible Cities (Crow Collection, Dallas, 2017–18), and Reversal Ritual (de Sarthe, Hong Kong, 2017), among others. Across formats - installations, social media interventions, stand-up comedy, and even Instagram filters - her practice refuses the distinction between the serious and the ludic. She inhabits the contradictions of late capitalism with an artist’s eye and a troll’s timing.
With Home Sweet Home Backyard: Golden House, Mak2 doesn’t just comment on the art market. She builds it into the work. Or rather, she turns the work into a market, one that players can influence, but never quite control. Just like everything else.
Mak2 lives and works in Hong Kong.
LINK: Mak2
