Ivan Lam's Together Alone (2011) was conceived as a billboard-scale provocation, then compressed to a print the viewer can hold. Issued in an edition of fifty to mark the opening of Wei-Ling Contemporary and Lam's solo exhibition of the same title, the sheet borrows the language of movie advertising only to undercut its promise of spectacle.
A group of crows perch across a flickering, code-like ground, while the title cleaves into two registers - "TOGET HER / ALONE" - forcing the eye to toggle between cohesion and fracture. The birds, urban scavengers more Hitchcock than Audubon, reprise Lam's earlier Panorama series (2007-2009), where billboards, buses and pedestrians floated through charged colour fields. Here, however, the vocabulary is pared back to stark silhouette and pixelated grid, compressing public space into data and leaving meaning to hover like static.
Lam has said the project sought to "stretch [his] work into another realm" by confronting viewers with scale, ambiguity and the slippery terrain between text and image. In that vein, Together Alone masquerades as a poster, winks like an advertisement and reflects the city's unease in its own fractured typography. Whether read as incisive commentary on metropolitan isolation or as stylised surface, the print stands as a concise record of Lam's ongoing exploration of connection and estrangement in the urban field.