Two-Dimensional Man

Smooth walls, flat screens and expressionless faces form an increasingly seamless environment in contemporary life. Yet beneath these surfaces lie concealed systems: pipes and wires hidden within walls, information circulating behind screens, and emotions that remain unexpressed. What appears flat and orderly often conceals a more complicated inner world.

Two-Dimensional Man emerged during the COVID-19 pandemic, amid the repeated tightening and easing of movement restrictions. As society moved between isolation and reopening, everyday life became increasingly organised around screens. Working, communicating and encountering the outside world through digital interfaces gradually became familiar, even as physical contact remained uncertain. What began as a temporary adjustment developed into a habitual way of living, accompanied by a growing sense of solitude.

Extending his earlier investigations into spiritual emptiness and digitalisation, Seah began to consider how this increasing familiarity with flat surfaces might also reshape our experience of physical, virtual and psychological space. Although digital technology offered connection during periods of separation, it also created an unsettling condition in which the world appeared constantly accessible yet increasingly distant.

In this series, Seah revisits the aesthetics of ancient relief sculpture through knife-carving techniques applied directly to painted surfaces. Through repeated cutting, scratching and removal, fragments of everyday imagery gradually emerge. The process resembles an act of excavation, as though attempting to recover meaning and emotional depth from an increasingly flattened environment.

The resulting compositions evoke objects suspended within a three-dimensional modelling workspace. Familiar forms appear fragmented and disconnected, hovering between recognisable physical objects and virtual representations. Their uncertain spatial relationships reflect the experience of moving between domestic confinement, digital environments and an inner world shaped by isolation.

The title responds to Herbert Marcuse's One-Dimensional Man, which examines how advanced industrial societies can diminish critical thought and absorb opposition into prevailing systems. Seah extends this concern through the metaphor of two-dimensionality, referring to the flatness of contemporary visual culture and the increasingly mediated conditions through which people experience the world.

The series also draws upon Tang Ping (躺平, or “lying flat”), a movement associated with younger generations in China who question the pressures of competition, productivity and conventional success. For Seah, lying flat suggests an ambiguous response to an accelerating society: it may represent withdrawal and resignation, but also the possibility of slowing down to recover space for independent thought.

Through the physical labour of carving into painted surfaces, Two-Dimensional Man attempts to interrupt the smoothness of contemporary life. The works reflect a period when the boundaries between isolation and connection, physical presence and virtual experience, became increasingly uncertain. As people grow accustomed to inhabiting a world through screens, what happens to the emotional and psychological spaces that cannot be contained within them?

Keywords: #DigitalCulture #PandemicExperience #Isolation #VirtualSpace #TangPing #CriticalThinking #MaterialIntervention #MakingAndUnmaking