BEIJING—Last April, Hong Kong’s Para/Site art space — a pioneering nonprofit gallery that has long been a center of gravity in the Hong Kong art scene — held its annual fundraising auction. Among those artworks donated for the sale was Pak Sheung Chuen’s One Day of the Artist’s Life. The winning bidder would spend 24 hours with the artist; according to a statement written by Pak and published in the auction catalogue, whatever artworks he created during this time would “become the properties of the Buyer/Collector.” The estimated value was HK$80–100,000 (approx. $10,000 to 13,000). Purchased by Hong Kong architect and collector William Lim, One Day of the Artist’s Life was realized within Lim’s studio on March 14–15, 2009. The resulting artworks and documentation, along with several of Pak’s previous works, are now being presented in the exhibition “One Day,” on view throughout the winter at Vitamin Creative Space’s Beijing outpost, the shop.

Pak, whose work gained wide exposure last year in the Hong Kong pavilion at the 2009 Venice Biennale, is a gifted artist whose practice locates the poetry hidden within even our most prosaic moments. To achieve this, Pak uses a range of approaches — including subtle public interventions, non-theatrical performance, and alternative cartography — to imbue everyday life with a sense of wonder. Pak’s artistic practice, for the most part, does not focus on the production of objects, but on situations that he orchestrates; video and photographic documentation result, as well as readymade items reframed within the artist’s symbolic system. The resulting exhibition is a constellation of evidence suggesting a universe brimming with happy accidents and untapped possibilities. Like a character in a Wong Kar-Wai film, Pak thrusts himself into strange conditions born of the question “What if?” so that we viewers may consider the answers.

The title work in "One Day" is an installation consisting of several parts: time-stamped paintings of the artist made by Lim that document the two men’s increasing familiarity throughout the 24-hour experiment (the paintings grow more detailed as the time progresses); videos of the artist and Lim conversing in Lim’s architecture studio, presented on two monitors that sit on the gallery floor; in situ photographs of things within Lim’s studio that caught Pak’s attention (stones, colored pencils, a dusty mirror), several of which were incorporated into artworks produced during the 24 hours. Some of these artworks and objects rest on a shelf that runs underneath a display of related photos, sketches, and notes.

All of this is of interest for several reasons. By compressing the artist’s creative process into such a short duration and presenting the results, One Day allows viewers to see with more clarity how Pak’s roving creativity operates. Stuck in the studio space with the two men, our eyes follow Pak’s as his vision alights on things we would have missed, transforming them into works of art through simple rearrangements, displacements, and snapshot depictions. In viewing the project, audiences are also invited to consider the erosion of distance between typically partitioned experiences. With the auction agreement in place and the work sold, there is a sudden collapse of the wall separating art making and loafing (or art and life), but also between the production and collection of art, which happens simultaneously under the terms of Pak’s arrangement. And by distilling the artist’s time into money (Lim told me he paid below the low estimate to acquire Pak’s One Day when it went on the auction block), the work makes one wonder about how such value can ever be calculated.

Questions about the role of the collector in this collaborative project were highlighted in a talk between Pak, Lim, and Vitamin co-founder and artistic director Hu Fang during the project’s Dec. 19 opening. During the conversation, Lim explained that he was interested in buying Pak’s One Day because he was feeling distanced from his art collection, most of which is kept in storage. On Day provided Lim with a chance to engage more directly with the art he buys — though perhaps a little too directly, since Lim underscored that the proposition of spending a solid 24 hours with someone he didn’t know well created a potentially awkward situation.