Chord

A chord — the simultaneous sounding of three or more pitches — provides the title for a print that sits within May's 2024 musical group alongside Music II. Etching's stepwise process suits the subject: the plate is bitten in stages, each acid bath cutting the exposed lines a little deeper and printing them a little darker, so the artist builds tonal weight from light initial passes to the heaviest, most ink-retentive marks. That structure mirrors the construction of a chord itself, in which individual notes are stacked into a single sounded event whose character depends on the spacing and weight of its components. Whether the image depicts hands at an instrument, a guitar's neck, or a more abstract arrangement of stacked forms, the title invites the viewer to read the print's tonal hierarchy as a musical hierarchy. Made at HKOP, where Hong Kong's small but established intaglio community works at shared presses, Chord also belongs to a thread in May's wider practice that treats intimate subjects — music among them — as occasions for examining how identity is built through repeated, layered acts.