ANNA NGAN LEONG CHEUNG

The exhibition title, “Onlooker”, positions the artist as a peripheral observer who experiences the scenes she depicts while maintaining a degree of detachment from their core. She captures firsthand perspectives that give each city its unique scale and texture: Beijing where she lives today is spacious and clearly layered; while the towering skyscrapers of her hometown, Hong Kong, makes a direct visual impact. She also captures subtle moments of incongruence in public spaces, such as parks and neighborhoods. With an acute sensitivity to these nuances, she renders them onto canvas in vivid colour.

Cheung’s paintings are built through thin, successive layers of oil or acrylic, resulting in a translucent quality that lends certain figures and objects an ephemeral presence. This approach resonates with her monotype printmaking practice, where she swiftly sketches an image onto a metal plate before transferring it to paper. After the initial transfer, she hand-paints additional layers of color. These recent prints fuse elements of printmaking and easel painting, depicting the visual inertia of different groups of people.

Moving from place to place, Cheung is both part of the city and always carries a certain external perspective. The exhibition follows her life trajectory—Hong Kong, London, Xuzhou, Beijing, Quanzhou, and traces of her short-term travels in Europe. Yet the cities in her images remain largely anonymous; at times, visual experiences from different regions are collaged into a single scene. In the works, there is often a reversal of internal and external, such as the intertext between the inside and outside in Gas Tank (2024) and Industrial Park (2024), or the concept of Deleuze’s “smooth space” in Airport-CD028 (2023) and the contrasting perspectives in Apron (2024). The artist’s attention to internal and external perspectives is the embodiment of the dual nature of her worldview.

The exhibition also includes two sets of street scenes from Covent Garden and Pengcheng, where new works from the past two years echo those first created in 2016/2017 from the same perspective. Over time, the artist’s way of seeing these places has evolved. Her paintings reveal the transformation of her psychological and emotional state, as well as her shifting understanding—or questioning—of her surroundings. For the artist, the physical space she painted is also an extension of psychological space. Perhaps her method of seeing is an artistic continuation of the “sense of place” described by Yi-Fu Tuan, reminding us that observation is never complete or objective. It is precisely because our emotional experience of space is constantly changing that the act of viewing itself remains an ongoing and unfolding process.