The work draws on Loke’s personal practice of associating seemingly unrelated objects and words to form an image. Here, the kitchen cleaver and the humble chair, both mundane in function, are assembled into a brutal bricolage. Their original purposes are distorted; what once served the body now suggests unspeakable harm and discomfort.

The chair, pierced with new and used cleavers etched with fractured words and radicals, becomes a site of dismembered language. It cannot be sat on, nor rested upon. It cannot be explained away. Among the etched characters is 解 (jiě), often translated as “to explain” or “to solve.” Its etymological roots—horn, knife, and cow—suggest a physical logic: to explain is to take apart. Some blades bear fragments from the Zhuangzi, where a butcher slices not with force but by sensing natural gaps.

The phrase “Broken English” evokes more than flawed grammar; it reflects the fractured speech of those caught between languages, the realities of bilingualism, and the violence of English imposed as a global lingua franca. In Unarmed Chair, language does not clarify. It cuts, wounds, resists comfort, and exposes the weight, and the violence, embedded in the act of explanation itself.