Camouflage and disguise are recurrent strategies in contemporary art. The work looks as if it were one thing, but it is something else; a gap exists between the work’s appearance and its being, between its Schein and Sein. A painting may look like a photograph or vice versa; what seems to be a massive body may be no more than a thin, hollow shell; and a form that represents one thing may signify something entirely different.

H. H. Lim—a young Chinese artist living in Rome—and the Italian painter Paolo Laudisa present a variation of this strategy of disguise and deception. In their paintings form