As a designer, artist and researcher, Paul Gong is highly inspired and driven by Jean-Paul Sartre’s Being and Nothingness. He is especially taken in by writings on the sixth sense - an elusive term that often escapes singular meaning. Different scholars across various disciplines have attributed the “sixth sense” to instincts, gut-feeling, extrasensory perception or even the presence of spiritual or religious guidance, among other things. Nonetheless, what remains undisputed is that the sixth sense is not physically rooted in our tangible body and organs. Yet it is through the same body that we connect to something beyond - “sixth sense”.

To Paul, the sixth sense is an abstraction that is rooted in materiality as much as it evades it. It is in trying to comprehend this sixth sense that he considers a way of explaining his own existence in this world. In his previous work The Sixth Sense Project, Paul questioned the usefulness/uselessness of humans’ organs and the essential existence of human beings. What could happen when one loses their sensory perception like in the movie Perfect Sense? Through a series of experiments using contraptions to enhance certain sensations, he explored the relationship between human beings' expectations for the unknown senses and the fear of losing the known senses, with the complex relationship between physiology and psychology when facing an uncertain future.‍

The Proust Moment and The Puzzle follow-on from this investigation into how the five senses become a means and way to understand our existence. Focusing on the olfactory, Paul addresses how the smell of pheromones forges relationships between people and between people and the environment. How can one liberate their sixth sense through the bodily-sensory experience?

The greatest difficulty lay in how the sense of smell could be translated for digital presence. In a medium that relies heavily on visuals and soundscapes, how can one mask/mute these two senses to heighten the olfactory? How can one create the sensory for the audience through synesthesia?

Drawing on how certain scents conjure memories - the Proust effect - Paul introduced olfactory masks to his performers with one person smelling underarm odor and the other person smelling the scent of hair-covered skull. In The Proust Moment the facial expressions, minute movements of the skin and the questions we hear guide both the performers and the viewer into their own memory associations. The Puzzle offers an intimate experience as we witness interactions with memory. This then becomes closer to demystifying the creation process as much as the art itself.