2018–2024

After the loss of 2016, Lo Chan Peng fell silent for years, then returned with a solo exhibition of the same name, "Those Changed by History and Those Who Changed It." What he peels this time is history — the largest, and least visible, wrapping of all.

At one pole stand the "historic movers": Lincoln, Darwin, Churchill, Che Guevara, Marx, and the Pope, God's spokesman among men. We are used to taking history for a directed narrative driven by such great figures; Lo instead sets them side by side as an "invisible web" of mutual connection, reminding you that this web is not a thing of the past — it still quietly shapes your worldview and mine, deciding for us what counts as right, what counts as progress. This is wrapping at its most cunning: it lies not on your body but in the very eyes with which you see the world. And he lets us see that these fires which once lit their age have mostly burned down to dying embers; the old web can no longer hold the drifting multitude.

At the other pole are the "doomed," those changed by history — the sufferers ground beneath its wheel, recorded only as numbers or as the nameless. Between these two poles he plants the real question: peel away the narrative that "great men drive history," and beneath it are countless people without names, paying the price for someone else's history; and every one of us, unawares, is the figure in the painting being rewritten by history.

To walk into this exhibition is to know an unforgettable experience: standing before the original work, not knowing what to do. Lo's paintings no longer deliver a message; they become a mirror — when the largest garment of all, history, is lifted at one corner, what you see is not an answer but your own soul, standing on a threshold it has not yet thought through.

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