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…