Eight is a lucky number in Chinese culture, and bapo refers to the damaged cultural ephemera hyper-realistically depicted in the paintings—worm-eaten calligraphies, partial book pages, burned paintings, remnants of rubbings and torn-open letters. They are usually arranged in a haphazard, collage-like composition, created with Chinese ink and colors on paper or silk. When bapo emerged, this unexpected imagery was radically distinct from classical Chinese landscape and figure painting, and became popular among an aspiring urban middle class delighted by its visual trickery and sophistication.

Partically-enclosing walls, broken and overlapping, allow the visitor to make connections across the gallery to different objects in the show. The show manifests the same shard-like imagery on the scrolls. One wall features an exploded diagram of the objects featured on a bapo scroll.