When we care deeply for someone, we rarely think about status or pride. A parent kneels for a child without hesitation. Years later that child may kneel for an ageing parent who can no longer bend down. I began to wonder what makes one person willing to kneel for another.

I had three weeks to make something new. I put out a call for old shoes, 300 pairs in the end, men’s, women’s, children’s, anything with laces still attached. People gave generously, often with a story quietly attached to the shoes themselves. I laid them out on the ground in seven circles, paired two by two, each pair facing the other. At the centre, a cross. Every single lace, I undid by hand.

The performance began with me alone, kneeling, lacing up one pair. Then I asked the room to join me. Strangers knelt on a dirty floor to thread laces through shoes that were not theirs, for people they had never met. Nobody hesitated for long.

What surprised me most was not the performance itself, but the response. In that moment the work ceased to be about its original inspiration. It became an observation about human nature.

When the exhibition ended, a woman came with a trolley and her young daughter. She collected second-hand goods to sell on the street for a living. She took every pair of shoes. Three hundred pairs that had carried other people’s stories went on to become someone’s income, and perhaps someone else’s only pair of shoes. The work had asked what care looks like. In the end, it answered its own question.

. . .

Two-Way Street ll was performed and exhibited as a solo exhibition at Jockey Club Creative Arts Centre, Hong Kong in 2016.