Look on My Works – Ozymandias in the Corner

This work is not simply a drawing but a spatial event. The coal-dust portrait of a shattered head — inspired by Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Ozymandias — is deliberately placed low to the ground, tucked into a neglected corner of the exhibition space. Its position is crucial: it resists the “white cube” convention of central, monumental display and instead invites an almost accidental, intimate encounter.
Inspired by the continuation of Shelley’s poem —
“…Near them, on the sand, / Half sunk, a shattered visage lies…” —
the work humbles itself before time. Its vulnerability is the point: it is not preserved behind glass like a museum artifact but left precarious, exposed to dust and erasure.
Medium-wise, it is a hybrid work: drawing as object, site-specific installation, and performance documentation (the act of placing it in the corner is part of the piece). The photograph you see here is not merely a record but an integral layer of the work, emphasizing its ephemerality.
Thematically, this piece meditates on ruin and entropy. Shelley’s famous line, “Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair,” becomes ironic — not a celebration of power but a quiet acknowledgment that even the mightiest rulers leave behind fragments destined to fade. By allowing the work to sit on the ground, vulnerable and unprotected, I stage a subtle confrontation with the art world’s impulse to monumentalize and preserve.
This work is simultaneously drawing, installation, and performance: it is about making fragility visible and turning the exhibition corner into a site of tension, loss, and critical reflection.
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