The wall of the underpass at City Hall subway station is red. Artworks are installed at regular intervals on this red-brick wall, but you could easily pass by without noticing them. They are installed in glass boxes below a child’s eye level, and they are the same size as the red bricks of the wall. The artist installed the boxes by removing the bricks and inserting the boxes in their place so fit flush to the wall. If you squat down in front of the glass boxes and look inside, you can see many miniature artworks such as clay dolls, an insect series made of anchovies and chrysalises, and a toy series made of toys that were broken into small pieces and put back together again. There are also many Hello Kitty and Pikachu dolls, small Jesus and Buddha statues, and various types of houses and fingernail-sized animals that may be brittle to the touch. These miniatures, born from the artist’s imagination layered onto familiar popular imagery, evoke the grotesque while simultaneously provoking laughter. By lowering your head to peer into the boxes, you might find one specific box with a camera inside—yes, you might. There is another camera on the ceiling of the passageway, and the scenes from both cameras are shown on video monitors, so you might see swiftly moving feet or your face looking into a glass box.
