All posts filed under: Reviews

Nai-Jen Yang 楊乃臻

Published by Jessica Wan

xi xi su su /Mother’s Tankstation /London /Mar 14 – Apr 17, 2025 / Nai-Jen Yang’s paintings unfold like whispered secrets, resisting immediate comprehension. In her first solo exhibition in London, at Mother’s Tankstation, surfaces made of gentle, meticulous brushstrokes evoke both lightness and weight, demanding time not as an aesthetic luxury but as a fundamental requirement for their visual effects to register. Looking at works like Bon Iver, Bon Iver and white noise (2024), the eye initially finds little to grasp. Yang’s process involves months of sustained engagement with individual canvases, listening to the same musical pieces while building up surfaces through thousands of repetitive marks. Working with oil paint and rabbit skin glue on fabrics such as calico, muslin and canvas, she creates surfaces that shift between opacity and translucence depending on angle and light. Applied without traditional gesso, the rabbit skin glue creates microscopic crystalline formations that catch and refract light throughout the day. From certain angles, these appear as tiny prisms embedded in the surface. The fabric remains partially transparent, revealing …

Oscar Chan Yik Long 陳翊朗

Published by Gerhard Mack

To Sleep and Wake Unafraid /PF25 cultural projects /Basel, Switzerland /Jun 14–22, 2025 / For his solo exhibition in Basel, Switzerland, Oscar Chan Yik Long created an environment of ink drawings.  Entering the space feels like entering a body, the inner skin of which is covered with images. They are wild and tender, haunting and peaceful, bleeding from memories and experiences, as bodies always carry the traces of our traumas and happy moments. Bleached out in black and white, they are like repercussions of moments lived through: monsters and guardians at the same time. There is no limit, there are no boundaries, only flow, like associations of the mind and bodily fluids, sour and sweet at once.  The space where this happens is a living room in a 16th-century building at the heart of medieval Basel. The walls are structured by painted panels and the ceiling is held up by mighty wooden beams, which together already create the atmosphere of a cosy cave, where time takes a breath and the heartbeat can slow. This most …

Ha Bik Chuen 夏碧泉

Published by Brady Ng

Reframing Strangeness /Para Site /Hong Kong /May 10 – August 10, 2025 / Typhoon season in Hong Kong is brutal. Tree limbs snap and fall. Ships are damaged or even run aground. Roads flood or, worse yet, cave in. But the rain gave Ha Bik Chuen inspiration. Specifically, he saw how the shoes of pedestrians left imprints on newsprint that lay stuck to the ground after it dried, the paper moulded with new bumps and contours, traces left by the people who had walked through as they sought cover from the deluge.  The artist decided to dedicate part of his practice to making paper artworks with pronounced bumps and grooves. Ha needed a way to shape the sheets, so he made more than 100 collagraph plates, which he called “motherboards”, between 1974 and 1995. The process surely drew upon the woodworking skills that he acquired as a teenage apprentice in a construction and decoration workshop in Jiangmen. With these print matrixes, Ha created an estimated 3,000 collagraphs, each with about six layers of paper and …

Wing Po So 蘇詠寶

Published by Caroline Ha Thuc

Take Turns Para SiteHong KongMar 15 – May 25, 2025 Wing Po So’s new installation presents itself as a constellation of three sculptural compositions – or “islands”, as the artist refers to them – constructed from old drawers once used in traditional Chinese medicine shops. These drawers, stacked and assembled in varying configurations, give rise to angular structures that appear simultaneously orderly and illogical. Some are positioned vertically, others inverted, open or shut, interlocked with precarious balance, ultimately producing a sense of organised chaos. Within the cold, stark environment of the gallery, the installation emerges as a living enclave – warm wood tones, the subtle scent of earth or dried herbs and a nearly recognisable soundscape evoking rhythmic breaths or pulses, all contributing to a multisensory experience. So seeks to recreate the dynamic choreography characteristic of traditional Chinese pharmacies. Having grown up in her parents’ shop, she experienced the daily rituals first-hand: opening and closing drawers, climbing stools to reach higher levels, bending towards lower compartments, crushing dried plants, grinding powders and blending ingredients. In this …

Tsang Kin-Wah 曾建華

Published by Caroline Ha Thuc

T REE O GO D EVIL /gdm /Hong Kong /Mar 19 – May 24, 2025 / Tsang Kin-Wah’s latest solo exhibition, T REE O GO D EVIL, is conceived as a total installation – an immersive visual and auditory environment that blends the artist’s characteristic use of textual quotations with edited video excerpts, including films or online clips depicting scenes of violence. The work revisits the artist’s enduring thematic concerns, drawing inspiration from the Bible, prophetic imagery of the apocalypse and current events to interrogate the contemporary meaning of moral values such as good and evil, the human capacity for judgement and humanity’s place within what Tsang frequently describes as an illusory world. Visitors enter the gallery through a narrow corridor, crossing metal grilles almost imperceptibly before arriving in the main exhibition space. At its centre stands a large pillar, a massive tree whose trunk is covered in letters and phrases. Its branches extend across the ceiling, made of coiled and uncoiled text, as well as suspended words and letters. While the formal language is …

Lynne Drexler 琳恩‧德雷克斯勒

Published by Ilaria Maria Sala

The Seventies /White Cube /Hong Kong /Mar 26 – May 17, 2025 / Few things can prepare you for what a chromatic explosion on canvas is really like. You might have seen pictures of Lynne Drexler works on a screen and thought that she uses colour in an extraordinary way, but her work is one of the many demonstrations that nothing compares to being able to stand in front of a painting and stare into it for as long as possible.  Drexler (1928-1999) is often described as an abstract expressionist and, later, a representational landscape and still life painter, who kept on applying her distinctive way with colour to render backgrounds – walls, skies, mountains or seas – creating something between abstraction and representation. Drexler herself used to say that she was a “colourist”, something she started developing during her years in college, in New York, where she was taught by Hans Hofmann – who had already developed his “push and pull” theory of colour, in which he would put together contrasting blocks of colour to …

Ruth Asawa 魯斯·阿薩瓦 Scott Kahn 斯科特·卡恩

Published by Ilaria Maria Sala

Doing Is Living /Once in a Blue Moon /David Zwirner /Hong Kong /Nov 19, 2024 – Feb 22, 2025 / David Zwirner Hong Kong’s double show, with ethereal sculptures by Ruth Asawa (1926-2013) on the lower floor and the moon paintings of Scott Kahn (b. 1946) on the upper one, pairs two very different artists, allowing the viewer to find unexpected connections between their works. In Asawa’s first solo show in Greater China, Doing is Living, her mesmerisingly beautiful sculptures float in the air with magical, perfectly mathematical rhythms. Born in California, Asawa created these, as she has said in a past interview, “by observing plants” and then taking  “a wire line and [going] into the air and [defining] the air without stealing it from anyone”. In this show, complementing the sculptures hanging from the ceiling, we can also admire a series of lesser-seen preparatory works, mostly watercolours of roses and irises but also meticulous renderings of leaves and their veins, and initial transpositions of these into patterns of lines and curves, both in ink: geometrical …

Lain Singh Bangdel

Published by Ilaria Maria Sala

Rossi & Rossi /Wong Chuk Hang, Hong Kong /Sep 28 – Nov 14, 2024 / The adjective that you will most often see associated with Nepali artist, preservationist, novelist and scholar Lain Singh Bangdel (1919–2002) is “iconic”. He is the man who single-handedly brought contemporary art into the Himalayan country, while at the same time being the most dedicated scholar of Nepal’s artistic past, painstakingly and doggedly compiling catalogues of looted or lost art, and making a remarkable contribution to our understanding of Nepal’s history and artistic heritage. A pioneer and the first truly international Nepali artist, Bangdel kept his deep interest in his country’s ancient art rather separate from his own artistic practice, which mainly consists of very modernist oil paintings, with clear influences from his contemporaries from all around the world. A recent show at Rossi & Rossi Wong Chuk Hang’s gallery was a very rare chance for people in Hong Kong to get a glimpse of the work of this household name in Nepal – a small but still quite comprehensive overview …

Reina Sugihara 杉原玲那

Published by Brady Ng

Respirare /Empty Gallery /Hong Kong /Dec 8, 2024 – Mar 1, 2025 / Everyone experienced the Covid pandemic on different terms. There were forced lockdowns for some and productive isolation for others, social pods and cautious public encounters, with a constant reminder of strained medical systems and an immense loss of life. For Tokyo-based painter Reina Sugihara, that era provided an opportunity to slow down and start a new hobby. Like many millennials around the world, she picked up bird watching. That was one of the kernels for Respirare, an exhibition of paintings by Sugihara at Empty Gallery. After a bout of sickness that affected her breathing, the artist came across an article about a bar-tailed godwit that set a world record by flying nonstop for 11 days, covering 13,559 kilometres between Alaska and Tasmania. Sugihara began to consider how birds breathe. Unlike human lungs, which move air in and out through the same pathway, avian respiration enables a one-way air flow, making it an efficient system that enhances oxygen uptake. This is crucial for …

Chow Chun Fai 周俊輝

Published by Ilaria Maria Sala

Map of Amnesia /Tang Contemporary Art /Hong Kong /Sep 13 – Oct 15, 2024 / The latest solo exhibition of Chow Chun Fai’s works at Tang Contemporary Art, Map of Amnesia, is a return to some of the artist’s favourite themes – Hong Kong city scenes, streets, taxis (Chow was a taxi driver for a few years), Hong Kong movies and nostalgia – which are explored on 14 canvases in a bright palette, slightly acidic, recalling the neon signs that used to fill the urban landscape. For these acrylic paintings, Chow used some of the images he has collected during more than 20 years of street photography. They show partially distorted buildings and streets, as if they were taken using an ultra-wide-angle lens. The result is akin to those vivid dreams in which familiar places appear not quite as they are in reality, yet perfectly recognisable, a kind of retinal memory that becomes entangled in meanings hidden in our subconsious. And to further complicate the picture, Chow has inserted some of the most iconic Hong …