GROUP EXHIBITION

Tommy XIE’s paintings explore how the self is continually perceived and reshaped through its encounters with the outside world. Growing up in Chaozhou, China, within the constraints of traditional family structures and conventional ideals of masculinity, Xie repeatedly sought to move beyond inherited expectations. After relocating to London, this impulse continued as a process of reorienting himself within a different social and cultural landscape. In Faith Through the Scars, a boy kneels on undulating grass, his body leaning slightly forward as a strand of beads lifts from his neck in the wind. Low clouds gather in the distance, while blades of grass bend in one direction. The wind itself remains unseen, becoming visible only through its effects on skin, ornament, and vegetation. It carries the sense that some change, not yet fully arrived, has already been registered by the body. In Xie’s work, the body is closely tied to vulnerability, perception, and boundaries. Uncovered skin exposes a certain fragility; touch, temperature, pain, and pleasure are all registered at its surface. At the same time, the body marks the threshold where the self comes into contact with others and with the world around it. Figure, wind, grass, and clouds inhabit the same shifting field of sensation. The surrounding environment seems at once to respond to the body and to recalibrate it, gradually bringing otherwise unspoken feelings into view.

Maya HEWITT’s British and Filipino family background, her upbringing in London, and a period of study in Japan have given her a layered visual and cultural vocabulary, one that finds particular expression in the landscapes of her paintings. The East Asian garden inhabited by darting koi in Where the Water Holds Light, the scene of a persimmon harvest drawn from a work by Kitagawa Utamaro in A Room Half Remembered, and the coastal view of Shizuoka in Atami all become vessels for lived experience and cultural memory. These landscapes carry Hewitt’s personal relationship to place, transforming specific natural settings into spaces shaped by emotion and recollection. The recurring figure of a young girl is closely connected to Hewitt’s experience of motherhood and caring for her two daughters. Her paintings often possess a dreamlike quality. Dolls, sleeping figures, old photographs, and keepsakes repeatedly surface within them as carriers of memory, giving the works a particular sense of time. They seem to belong neither fully to the present nor to the past, but to a moment in which the act of remembering the past is itself unfolding in the present.

Von Hyin KOLK’s practice is rooted in the gaps between language, memory, and cultural understanding.

Cantonese, Chinese idioms, childhood experiences, and everyday imagery are brought into shifting relationships of displacement and recombination. A second-generation Chinese American of Cantonese heritage, Kolk has an almost childlike grasp of Cantonese, yet a deep fascination with Chinese idioms and classical expressions. Literal interpretations, information lost in translation, and meanings that can never be fully reached together generate a particular tension. Rather than attempting to repair these fragmentary forms of understanding, she turns mistranslation and literal interpretation into ways of producing new narratives. This approach to language also informs the way Kolk constructs her paintings.

Images are borrowed, interwoven, and collaged, as though words were being rearranged within a new context. At the same time, highly saturated yet slightly faded yellows and reds, together with the theatrical poses of her figures, evoke the visual language of 1960s American film posters. Disparate images are compressed into a single pictorial space, connected yet never fully explained. Through their overlaps and dislocations, they give rise to an open, nonlinear narrative.