“A lot of people thought this cavernous doorway was my work,” remarked Kong Chun Hei while reflecting on Stairs (2023), an installation presented in his solo show at Hong Kong’s Para Site that same year. Titled “PS,” the exhibition featured a series of architectural interventions to the newly renovated kunsthalle on the 10th floor of the storied Wing Wah Industrial Building. To develop these works, Kong closely followed the transformation of the space from a nondescript industrial shell into two snug, neatly finished galleries. Interconnecting the newly configured rooms was a dividing wall with two gaping, coarse-edged entryways, which evoked an abrupt, primordial collision.

Contrary to what many spectators assumed, Kong’s work was not the dramatic carve-out of a drywall—a gesture that would have recalled Gordon Matta-Clark’s unforgettable building cuts from the 1970s. Instead, staying true to its matter-of-fact title, his contribution was an unassuming, two-step block made from fragments of the broken wall, which were visibly suspended in a concrete mixture to produce a terrazzo-like pattern. The piece, bridging the two galleries, was meant to be stepped on by visitors—an almost unnoticeable, if not negligible structure that completely blended into its surroundings rather than asserting its objecthood. Yet without it, one would not have been able to move quite so seamlessly between the two galleries, and the vestiges of the demolished wall—which had facilitated the spatial division—would have been disposed of at a scrapyard before being pestled into a heap of concrete powder. Unremarkable as it may have first appeared, Kong’s modest staircase held many scintillating revelations.