CHEUK KA-WAI CHERIE

A graduate of Hong Kong’s rigorous ink painting programmes, Cheuk represents a generation that honours tradition while embracing conceptual freedom. Her works retain Song Dynasty technical mastery—evident in exquisite renderings of birds and branches—yet pulse with comic book nergy and digital-age hybridity. The artist’s earlier triptych Eternal Current visualises this duality: seabirds and waves form an infinity symbol, capturing what Cheuk calls “life’s unbroken rhythm within fragmented time.”

The definitive highlight of the exhibition is a pair of Chinese screens of walnut wood, a variation of Cheuk’s large-scale “handscroll” commissioned by Hong Kong Museum of Art for the exhibition Fragrance of Time – In Search of Chinese Art of Scent (June – October 2024). Through the ten paintings and images of various local plants and flowers, Cheuk invites the audience to gather snippets of the city’s culture and explore local scents. The original album of local plants that served as the basis of the museum commission will also be included in this exhibition.

In this recent body of five works, Cheuk’s innovative brushwork blurs the boundaries between cultures and materials. She reimagines popular childhood games—Super Mario, Pac-Man, Rubik’s Cube and Puzzles—as vibrant cultural landscapes and incorporates the aesthetics of Japanese ukiyo-e into the meticulous details of Chinese gongbi painting. Her deft use of various mediums, including Chinese ink, Japanese pigments, and Western acrylics embodies what she describes as 「乘物游心」 – a spirited journey where ”(the) contemporary isn’t linear time, but our chosen dialogue with history.”

Cheuk, drawing from Yuan Dynasty texts on climates, examines the 24 solar terms and their associated natural phenomena through this group of painting “collages”. The artist merges these traditional elements with contemporary urban vignettes, crafting subtle surreal imagery that navigates familiar yet foreign scenes, capturing the essence of each season.

Cheuk’s work reflects a new era of contemporary ink art, moving away from the traditional literati style rooted in Confucian, Taoist, and Buddhist influences. Instead, she infuses elements of urban life and contemporary communities, creating a unique artistic language. This group of works is arranged in pairs, juxtaposing antiquities with modern objects—classical flowers and birds next to modern toys and trinkets—to allow for a dialogue between the past and the present pictorially and thematically. Like a visual time machine, her juxtapositions reveal how today’s mundane items will become tomorrow’s cultural relics.