Stacey Chan Lok Heng: “Placebo”

Commonly known theories about the placebo effect typically revolve around the psychology of expectation. One feels better after the sugar pill not because of its innate curative properties but because of one’s belief therein. So how does belief invoke such power? And if it is so potent a nostrum, where does medicine stand in relation to more abstract or occult prescriptions? These questions formed the basis of Stacey Chan Lok Heng’s “Placebo,” her focused solo debut at Gallery Exit in Hong Kong.

Installed in a row on a wall were five glass-and-steel cylinders, evoking sci-fiesque equipment from a lab or pharmaceutical assembly line. Each container in Redemption II (all 2021) is filled with chalky Buddha heads cast from powdered Panadol. If the symbolic conflation of spirituality and science feels literal, the work is nevertheless a well-executed crystallization of their intertwined fates in humanity’s torturous path toward salvation. In amalgamating the medicinal and the metaphysical, the work eschews a reductive opposition to instead alight on the common thread of need—for answers, transcendence, an end to suffering—that is the other face of belief.

Placebo similarly intersects medicine and religion but in poignantly intimate and quotidian terms. Mounted on a sheet of white paper are four neat rows of miniature sculptural palms, each the size of a tablet. Arranged in a calendar-like formation, the mudras present the ritual of taking one’s medication as a daily plea for normalcy.

The sublimation of symbolized illness within the rigid order of the grid is a recurring motif, seen in a larger scale in Chan’s square canvases. Spanning nearly two meters, Dosage portrays hundreds of palimpsestic capsules rendered in clumps of crushed Panadol that disappear into the white background from afar. Only up close does one see their grainy texture, as well as the subtle differences in density from one shape to the next; the way the pills drift in and out of visibility conjures the distorted perception of a groggy patient. Raised lines of antihistamine scar the pale eggshell ground of Chlorpheniramine, while in the pale pink Holy Aspirin the grid is barely discernible, revealing itself in watery smudges that seem to seep out from dissolving lines. There’s a clear nod here to the formal purity and repetition of minimalism, establishing connections between artistic process, pharmacological worship, and ritualized healing.

What emerges, then, is a broader examination of authority—the artistic, medical, and spiritual figures we vest with power because it is comforting to identify loci of goodness and genius, purity and promise. “Placebo” was encompassing and rigorous in its dissection of the things we need to believe in, the balms we anoint on the fault lines of our consciousness.

Stacey Chan Lok Heng’s “Placebo” was on view at Gallery Exit, Hong Kong, from September 25 until October 30, 2021.

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