Tom de pekin

Tom de Pekin is an artist, graphic designer, illustrator, painter, and filmmaker. At the Paris Ass Book Fair, he is presenting a collection of publications centered on the reappropriation of images. Whether intimate, anonymous, or part of a shared cultural heritage, these images form a personal archive that the artist enjoys exploring, unfolding, and utilizing in all its forms. By presenting the source archive alongside its representation, as in a game of mirrors, he highlights the space between the two, making the shift in desires and emotions visible. This artistic practice is linked to our cathartic use of images. It addresses the way each of us relates to our own obsessions and contradictions and achieves autonomy in our daily engagement with images—contemporary or older—that we appropriate and adapt to our desires.

The project “Le parc est son jardin,” presented this year at the fair, is based on an engraving and its original drawing attributed to Jean-Charles de la Fosse (1734–1789). Tom establishes an intimate dialogue—a ghostly trace—with his first wanderings through the Tuileries Garden upon his arrival in Paris in 1987. In doing so, he retraces the memory of our sexualities and the time that has slipped away between our bodies.

“Parks and gardens remain the silent witnesses to our encounters and our desires.”