LAURAINE MAK: General Knowledge
LAURAINE MAK
General Knowledge
Opening reception: Wed, Oct 21, 6-8PM
Exhibition: Oct 21 – Nov 21, 2026
Wil Aballe
1375 Railspur Alley
Vancouver, BC
V6H 3R7
For inquiries please contact Wil Aballe, wil@waapart.com
Mak’s oil paintings incorporate fragments of history, art, politics, science and popular culture, placing them on equal footing: a Getty image of the earth, a Juicy Couture bag, Princess Diana, the pharaoh Hatshepsut, and an American gold bullion coin among others.
The title points to the general knowledge quiz, where stray facts are collected and exchanged as cultural currency. The series describes an engagement with knowledge that moves freely and superficially across subjects.
Repetition is the hinge of the series. By painting over and over in dense, laborious, all-over fields that read almost as pattern, Mak’s motifs begin to lose their fixed and presumed meanings. Princess Diana’s face is tiled until it is a surface and texture. It challenges the notion of contemporary painting by refusing the singular, auratic object in favour of proliferation, and it asks who decides which images sit near the top of the hierarchy and which are disposable. This investigation questions the economy of painting, speculating on the value system of art as products destined to be entombed behind plexiglass vitrines.
In Canada, this sits alongside painters who work from photographic and digital sources while maintaining the discipline of the medium. Mak’s work belongs to the counter-current for whom the reference is an archive. This series is legible in exactly that register, using the medium of painting to interrogate the conditions under which images are encountered now. The paintings offer knowledge that is available, pleasant and sometimes useless; the feeling of recognising everything or nothing at all.
Her time studying in Germany places her work in a second frame. Sigmar Polke and Gerhard Richter, who transformed pre-existing photographs into paintings, established appropriation as a painterly problem through a conceptual gesture. To paint in that context is to accept that the medium carries a weight of history, and that repetition is a way of working with that weight rather than around it.
LAURAINE MAK is an artist based in Vancouver, Canada. Her practice engages philosophical questions through painting, sculpture, moving image, and installation. Drawing on systems of measurement, repetition, language, and commodity culture, her work examines how structures of logic and value shape contemporary visual experience. Mak holds a BFA from Emily Carr University of Art and Design and an MFA from Simon Fraser University. She was a guest student at Kunstakademie Düsseldorf under Rita McBride. Her work has been exhibited internationally, including in Austria, Germany, Egypt, Korea, Hong Kong, and Canada.
