Gallery EXIT is pleased to present ‘Symphony of Light and Stone’, with recent paintings by LAI Nga Lun, CHO Wing Ki, and LAU Siu Chung. The exhibition brings together three distinct perspectives, from architectural landscapes and human activities to the interplay between nature and the city, the artists collectively compose with colors and shapes, a symphony of light and stone, that commemorate the vibrancy of urban life.

Opening reception: Saturday, 8 February 2025, 2:00 – 5:00pm

Gallery address: 3/F, 25 Hing Wo Street, Tin Wan, Aberdeen

Gallery EXIT presents ‘Their Memories’ by Daphné MANDEL, featuring a new series of works by the Hong Kong-based French artist. Positioning herself as an observer, for many years MANDEL has been engaging with her adopted city’s past. Exploring villages in the New Territories and collecting stories from local villagers whose lifestyle is on the brink of disappearing, she explores the themes of pattern and repetition versus singularity and uniqueness through the narratives of rural life and industrial heritage.
 
Upon entering the gallery, the viewer is greeted by a long row of small paintings from the Their Memories series. Seen from a distance, these paintings drawn from formal family portraits, photographs of casual friends and family gatherings and occasions, weekend excursions and travels abroad form a repetitive pattern of shapes, shades of sepia, browns and greys, evoking a cycle of lives of a people who have left their rural village homes and their memories behind. Only when scrutinised up close do the individual stories become discernible. As the artist wanders around abandoned homes in rural villages, she often comes across photo albums that have survived several decades in a decaying and humid structure, the photographs within turned into a palette of browns, sepia, pinks and yellows. Time, material deterioration, the artist’s intervention and act of painting, transform the ephemeral images into the abstraction of memory.

Exhibition opening: 3-5pm, Saturday, 30 November

Gallery address: 3/F, 25 Hing Wo Street, Tin Wan, Aberdeen

Gallery EXIT presents ‘And yet it moves’, a solo exhibition by local artist Ticko LIU, featuring 14 new works by the artist revolving around the ‘meaninglessness’ of the everyday. Sensing the immensity of the universe and the brevity of life, hence the insignificance and meaninglessness of human existence, the artist accumulates and organises these futile instances, capturing and transforming them into beautiful landscapes, i.e. art as a form of existence. In this body of work, LIU attempts to transform the various messages and meaningless events encountered during his daily transits into sentiments and images, to be transferred onto the canvas. During transit, a multitude of noises flash at him: The vehicles going back and forth on the opposite lane, street lights, distant stars and the moon; each projected light constitutes a message, evoking a separate world complete in itself, whispering to him. On the highway, headlights are like shooting stars, just as the Earth and other planets orbit the sun, and the solar system orbits the Milky Way. LIUgathers up these light fragments, ponders their meaning, as he searches for his own place among all things in the universe.

Opening reception: Saturday, 19 October 2024, 2 - 5pm

Gallery address: 3/F, 25 Hing Wo Street, Tin Wan, Aberdeen

Gallery EXIT is pleased to present a series of new works by Livy Leung, entitled ‘Between a Pause’. By altering lines, shapes, colours in real scenery, Leung creates a flattened space on the canvas towards the intersection between the real and imaginary world. The exhibition title refers to the state of waiting for something to happen in the course of creating this series, and the artist’s attempt to capture the atmosphere between pauses before things are set adrift.

‘Repetition’ and ‘waiting’ constitute an essential part of the painter’s creative process: Repeatedly one adds and eliminates stroke by stroke, alternates between colours, and reconstructs the composition. Sometimes the final work may look almost the sameas before all the changes. It may feel futile at first, but gradually one realises that this is an important part of the painting practice. The process of repeated alteration carries with it the artist’s personal state, as she waits for a sense from the image, to be slowly smoothed and flattened through repeated changes, digested, before finally becoming the image in her mind. It is the artist’s meditation.

Opening reception: Saturday, 14 September, 2-5pm

Gallery address: 3/F, Blue Box Factory Building, 25 Hing Wo St, Aberdeen

‘Few (feu)’ is a French word that carries connotations of fire or lighting. The transformed, hazy memories and the whereabouts of time in Mochizuka’s paintings are derived from daily life, where one can visually perceive and remember through the presence of daylight and electric light. These visual memories are formed and seen through the light within the imagery. The fire in the darkness would illuminate and reveal the unseen.

Mochizuka paints from memory and imagination. A starting point or image is selected and abstracted for each new body of work. Moving away from traditional subject matters such as flowers, forests and foliage, and towards integrating them in an abstract manner, he started to use shaped canvases around 2016. His recent series of oil paintings with dark backgrounds and bursts of light colours integrates ancient lacquer techniques using multiple layers of paint to obtain deep, rich and smooth surfaces. As he rediscovers and discloses the underlying colour layers with his finger tips, the abstraction of floral motifs bursts from the canvas. Surrounded by the varnished surface, the imaginary nature from another world of psychedelic colours comes to mind and invites the viewers into other spaces full of vim and vigour. The act of manually rediscovering the unconsciously painted areas adds to the fascination and tantalising qualities of these daunting works.

Exhibition Opening: Saturday, 14 September, 2 - 5pm

Gallery address: 3/F, Blue Box Factory Building, 25 Hing Wo St, Aberdeen

For this group exhibition ‘Those off-duty gazes’, Gallery EXIT collaborates with WURE AREA, as we review and reveal our mission, and explore possibilities for the future. This exhibition is curated by WURE AREA, showcasing in the exhibition space of Gallery EXIT the new works of ten young artists: CHAN Kam Lun, Mae CHAN, CHEUNG Tsz Ki, GO Hung, Jeremy IP, Rico LAU Ching Hei, LEE Chiu Sun, LEUNG Hoi Nga Livy, Giraffe LEUNG Lok Hei and WONG Winsome Dumalagan, with an original and experimental curatorial strategy that presents a different approach to a gallery/experimental space. The habit of observation that comes with one’s character/identity is absorbed into life, and the thoughts that precede the inspiration of art are embedded in the daily routine. Intelligence, grand and trivial, is always collected in the artist's pocket in their off-duty-time, and at some point it is interpreted as the motivation and rationale for their work.

Opening: Saturday, 29 June 2024

Gallery address: 3/F, 25 Hing Wo Street, Tin Wan, Aberdeen

Gallery EXIT presents ‘Journey to the East’, a solo exhibition by Konstantin Bessmertny. The first solo exhibition of the celebrated Macau/Hong Kong-based artist of Russian origin with Gallery EXIT features a recent series of paintings, ceramics and objects in the artist’s signature playful style rich in classical and contemporary references from a melange of East and West cultures that is central to both the artist’s creation and being. In what Bessmertny calls his visual investigations, the context is often to be gleaned from the many details and symbols embedded in the fun yet enigmatic imagery.

Besides paintings, the exhibition also showcases works of ceramics, small sculptures and objects, again overwhelmed with the same visual elements and intellectual humour and satire. ‘Hand of the Philosopher’, ‘Philosophy Protects Seven Liberal Arts’, and ‘How to Make Gold at Home’ are made in the Chinese porcelain town of Jingdezhen and handpainted by the artist. The anti-monument sculpture ‘In Perpetum (Public Art Proposal)’ appears also in ‘Grobianus et Grobiania (Natarajasana will Save the World)’. More than just decorative forms, Bessmertny’s art offers multiple levels of reading that both challenge and amuse, where contemporary commentary mixes with artistic and historical allusions.

Gallery address: 3/F, 25 Hing Wo Street, Tin Wan, Aberdeen

Gallery EXIT presents Stephen WONG Chun Hei’s solo exhibition ‘The Star Ferry Tale’, showcasing the artist’s latest landscape paintings. During his many years living in Hong Kong, Wong sketches as he rambles through the local landscape, which becomes material for his creation. His works vividly depict the urban and rural sceneries that incorporate idealised imagery from his subjective imagination, at once strange and familiar, prompting the viewer to contemplate the interdependence of man and nature between the real and the surreal.

The exhibition opens with ‘The Star Ferry Tale’, a set of 11-panel large scale panoramic oil paintings inspired by space documentaries. With galaxies as backdrop, the perspective is extended to outer space, overviewing Hong Kong from above planet Earth. Filled with imaginative elements, the work expresses the artist’s personal response towards the grandeur and infinity of the universe. Under the scrutiny of the telescope, the universe’s past exists in parallel with our present. Likewise, the work adopts a non-linear narrative where different temporal and spatial planes crisscross each other, a Hong Kong space epic documenting the transition of eras.

Gallery address: 3/F, 25 Hing Wo Street, Tin Wan, Aberdeen

Gallery EXIT presents Dony Cheng Hung’s solo exhibition ‘Finding Rest on the Highway’, showcasing the artist’s recent paintings, animations and installations. the exhibition builds upon Cheng’s aesthetics and methodology of her two previous exhibitions, ‘Elaboration of the reflected lights’ (Gallery EXIT, 2022) and the 2023 CUHK Fine Arts Master’s Graduates Exhibition. Utilising the entire gallery space, with painting, animation, installation and projection, the artist constructs a conceptual landscape from her own imagination.

Exhibition opening: Saturday, 17 February 2024 (2 - 5 pm)

Gallery address: 3/F, 25 Hing Wo Street, Tin Wan, Aberdeen

Gallery EXIT presents ‘Aurora’, Stanley Shum’s solo exhibition featuring 8 oil paintings created this year. The exhibition runs from 6 January to 3 February, 2024.  The new works in this exhibition reflect the sincere hopes of the artist and the community where he belongs for the future amidst the current turbulent world situation, touching on major issues of the era, such as emotional relationship, rebuilding of civilisations and migration, contemplating on how to live a resilient life, in love and solidarity, projecting a message of light and hope in the darkness.
 
‘Aurora’ refers to the Roman goddess of dawn, the first light as night turns into day, announcing the arrival of dawn to the world, after which Galileo named the phantasmagoric northern lights. The past two years had a special significance for Shum: The end of the pandemic and the birth of his daughter symbolised a new life, in both senses of the word, and inspired these works about ‘hope’ and ‘imagination of the future’. In Shum’s recently developed methodology of visual presentation, figurative landscapes overlap with abstract lines and colour blocks, sharp lines dissect light into its original spectral components as through a prism, where large amounts of red, blue and yellow are employed. Like neon lights, the dazzling colours contrast starkly with the dark black, setting off the struggle between light and darkness. A singed seed leads the audience into a splendid and vast world of fantasy, sprouting from burnt ashes and growing into something more than an illusory flower.

Opening: Saturday 2-5pm

Gallery address: 3/F, 25 Hing Wo Street, Tin Wan, Aberdeen

Gallery EXIT presents Glary Wu’s solo exhibition ‘A Sentimental Journey’, featuring a new series of nine oil paintings, on show from 6 January to 3 February, 2024. Like a visual journal, the exhibited new works record recent events during the time when Wu, experiencing a state of loss, went travelling with her intimate friends. In an attempt to extend her memories and personal feelings through these paintings, the artist engages in a private self-dialogue and self-discovery, in the process gaining more self-knowledge and grounding, reflecting on what the act of painting means for her.
 
In Wu’s paintings, scenes and characters from daily life are presented on the canvas as individual scenes from a stage play. Revolving around trivial happenings and interactions between people, her paintings are rich in imagination and narrative quality, with special attention to the interactions between the various elements and characters on the pictorial surface and associations evoked from the scenes. Compared with her other works previously exhibited at Gallery EXIT, also rendered in the warm soft tones with the sentimental and ambiguous quality of memory, the new works manifest a distinct change in painting technique, where flowing lines and blurry brushstrokes become bolder, while in terms of tone and atmosphere, old photograph-like brownish yellows and greens pervade and define the whole series.

Opening: Saturday 2-5pm

Gallery address: 3/F, 25 Hing Wo Street, Tin Wan, Aberdeen

Opening on 25 November 2023 and running through 22 December 2023, "Ambiguous Spaces’ features 14 new works by local artist Elpis Chow. Using painting as her chief medium of creation, Chow is an adept observer of urban spaces and corners who reconstructs regular lines and colours in architecture, representing another real space on the pictorial surface. Chow’s works depict the odd sides of Hong Kong cityscape, sites frequented yet very often neglected, such as street corners, buildings, corridors in housing estates and ramps, evoking a visual contrast that is at once familiar and strange. 
 
In the scenes depicted in the new works can be found real or fictitious creatures, forming a collection of the artist’s favourite species and in a certain sense, her personal bestiary of imaginary beings. Circumventing real life circumstances that do not allow the satisfaction of her desire to collect, Chow selects interesting elements from her biological image database made up of animal documentaries, daily snapshots, internet images, etc., collaging them onto imagined scenes with a computer software. After transferring the black and white sketches onto the canvas, Chow then fills them with vivid colours. Chiaroscuro is represented by layers of different shades of the same colour scheme, dark outlines and neat composition all point to a flatness that belongs to illustration, with a hint of the Pop Art or the Superflat aesthetics. In addition to juxtaposing specific creatures and sites, the new works demonstrate a continued colour experiment, bringing the fantastic images towards a realm bordering on the surreal, reminding us once again of the fictional nature of the works. 

Opening reception: 25 November, Saturday 2 - 5 pm

Gallery address: 3/F, 25 Hing Wo Street, Tin Wan, Aberdeen

Gallery EXIT presents ‘Crossways’, solo exhibition of local artist Kaiaroonsuth Chonticha, opening on 25 November 2023 until 22 December 2023, featuring new painting works by the artist. The artist draws on her year of living in a subdivided flat on Ki Lung Street/Boundary Street in Kowloon, in search of hints of fermentation and the growth of life from things as big as the self and other people to those as small as the moss on the wall. Beginning with the wall and the moss, Kaiaroonsuth Chonticha develops a series of explorations into the self, others and the city. Her mixed cultural heritage and Chinese and Thai is at once rooted in tradition and encompassing transition, alienation and intersection. As a result, the artist’s way of seeing is also diverse and shifting, full of uncertainties. With her not too fluent Cantonese, the artist’s Thai mother speaks in an illogical manner full of unexpected associations, splashed with the innocent and joyful character of Thai people. This is counteracted by her traditional Teochew father and Hong Kong-style education. Growing up through stories in life as a ‘vessel’ instead of a subject, the artist as an observer is especially sensitive to the dynamics between things and self-consciousness. Manifested in her creation, these become brushstrokes left over from repeated superimpositions and erasures.

Opening reception: 25 November, Saturday 2 - 5 pm

Gallery address: 3/F, 25 Hing Wo Street, Tin Wan, Aberdeen

Gallery EXIT is pleased to present Ngai Wing Lam new solo exhibition ‘No Dreams Can Last Longer Than A Night’. In recent years Ngai mostly works with oil applied directly onto wooden panels cut or framed into different shapes, and displayed in the form of storyboards divided by specially designed wooden frames. Using the wooden frames as dividers for storyboards, the artist establishes narrative perspectives, then posits two landscapes against each other.

Exhibition opening: Saturday, 21 Oct 2023 (2 - 5 pm)

Gallery address: 3/F, 25 Hing Wo Street, Tin Wan, Aberdeen

Gallery EXIT is pleased to present a new solo exhibition by Oscar Chan Yik Long, showcasing paintings in acrylic and ink on canvas (all from 2023) and titled ‘It’s the smiles that keep us going’. Something has happened in Chan’s practice since his first solo exhibition at the gallery two years ago. He used to restrict himself to Chinese ink or graphite, although with much nuance between the black and the white. Now there is colour, almost every colour – splashes of red and pink and orange and yellow and brown and green and blue and purple – and on top there are probing, fast-moving, dancing lines and blots of ink.

Exhibition opening: Saturday, 21 Oct 2023 (2 - 5 pm)

Gallery address: 3/F, 25 Hing Wo Street, Tin Wan, Aberdeen

Gallery EXIT presents ‘A Guide to Fragmented Spaces’, a group exhibition of new works by nine young artists, covering a wide range of media including painting, installation and sculpture. Using their own experiences as a starting point, the artists reconstruct all kinds of illusory speculative spaces with the visual symbols and rules found in the real world. Most of the artists are exhibiting in a gallery for the first time.

Gallery address: 3/F, 25 Hing Wo Street, Tin Wan, Aberdeen

Gallery EXIT presents a group exhibition ‘Phase of Matter’, featuring the works three emerging Hong Kong artists: Jeremy IP, Ashlee IP and Sammi MAK, running from 15 July to 19 August 2023. The opening reception will be held on Saturday, 15 July, 2 – 5pm.
 
‘Phase of Matter’ showcases the recent works of the three artists: Blending figurative and abstract elements to create symbols, Jeremy Ip Yip sees himself as a tool and medium for his paintings, with which to deepen his perception of life and increase his awareness beyond social symbols; Ashlee Ip achieves in her works a delicate balance of chaos and order; using paint as a language to express her connection with the natural world, Sammi Mak invites viewers to enter and immerse in the realm of her artwork. Each in their own unique visual languages of abstraction and personal approaches to the medium, the three young artists create paintings with complex compositions, colours and forms.

Gallery address: 3/F, 25 Hing Wo Street, Tin Wan, Aberdeen

Tobe Kan’s solo exhibition ‘Liminal Interval’ explores the concept of liminality: The state of in-betweenness and of transitioning from one state to another, while also emphasising the displacement of time. Inspired by the liminal moments of dawn and dusk, the exhibition features paintings and installations that capture the elusive and intangible qualities of transition and transformation. By blurring the boundaries between different times of day in her works, Kan creates a sense of liminality, where the viewer is suspended in a space that is neither fully day nor fully night.

In relation to the idea of boundaries, the works in the exhibition investigate the interdependence of living things and the impermanence of all states of being, emphasising the interconnectedness of all things. Drawing inspiration from her personal experiences and observations of the world, the artist scrutinises the present moment through the depiction of living plants. Intricate and delicate lines reflect her intuitive response to the world around her and create a sense of movement and fluidity that is both dynamic and thought-provoking.
 
The recurring motif of certain plant species throughout the exhibition evokes a sense of deja vu, a feeling familiar to our everyday experience in Hong Kong. These plant species are common to the city, and their repeated presence serves as a reflection of the significance of personal associations and memories that these experiences create, as well as the interdependence of living organisms.

Opening reception: Saturday, 10 June, 2 – 5pm.

Gallery address: 3/F, 25 Hing Wo Street, Tin Wan, Aberdeen

Developing from the creative direction of her previous exhibition, Hon’s new exhibition showcases multifarious surreal landscapes. Unpredictable and constantly changing, the landscapes depicted in Hon’s paintings exude a strong sense of alienation and melancholy, another world severed from that of the exhibition space. The unspecified characters and events in the paintings constitute recurring scenes on the pictorial surface which are at once familiar and strange; some repeated motifs include the various states of sunrise and sunset, a smothering house, a man in a hat, a sailing boat in the sea, misty rain and rose-tinted clouds.
 
With strong colour contrasts, Hon’s works place more emphasis on the overall impression of represented objects through the transition of colours and shades, than their form and meaning. The clouds in the sky are rendered as a massive colour field, inconstant like flowing water, making it difficult for the viewer to tell the time of day. Sometimes it is the darkening sky before the storm, the sense of humidity and apprehension in the air as disaster approaches. Instead of the high contrast colour schemes often found in her previous works, such as oranges and blues, a distinct middle tone can be discerned in her new works in this exhibition. Through the layering of translucent contrasting colours, a middle tone is achieved when viewed from a distance, in which traces of various colours can be distinguished when viewed up close. The complementary colours create a more calm and smooth atmosphere, and a sense of subtlety and ambiguity.

Gallery address: 3/F, 25 Hing Wo Street, Tin Wan, Aberdeen,

Gallery EXIT is pleased to present Korean artist Jeong Yun Kyung’s solo exhibition ‘Stone Planet’. Always personal and sensational, Jeong’s works, as a response to her immediate surroundings, embody her own intimate emotions and experiences. Rendered in a combination of bold colours, lines, and gestures, her paintings summon up the experience of witnessing or expecting the passing through of a meteoroid over a serene landscape before one’s eyes. With this latest series of paintings, the artist aims to capture the fleeting moment, a flash of time that one experiences, and express the sensations and memories evoked by such decisive moments.
 
In Jeong’s practice, recurring natural motifs and shapes, such as feather, leaf, spiral, wave, are layered in different sections of the painting and are crucial elements that have been present and developed since the beginning of her artistic practice. Executed with care and relatively light in colour and tone, the ridged and layered parts have a quality of detailed neatness about them, evoking a feeling of tranquility. In contrast and parallel to this calmness, spontaneous brushstrokes, spray-painted lines and splashes of paint of bold and vivid colours permeate the painting surface in an unrestrained manner, symbolising such artificial elements as plastic, neon, traffic, which is loud, boisterous and exciting.

Gallery address: 3/F, 25 Hing Wo Street, Tin Wan, Aberdeen

Gallery EXIT presents a group exhibition ‘New Gaze’, featuring the works of Celia KO, LAU Siu Chung, Ticko Liu and Glary Wu.
 
Through this series of works, Celia KO explores her various constructions of reality through still-life painting as a seemingly naturalistic world intensely observed. Obsessed with capturing the fleeting moments of everyday life, LAU Siu Chung’s works depart from the city where he lives, leading the viewer through various urban landscapes and street impressions, where city and nature seem to blend into one another, though the artist feels that there is always a line separating the two. For Ticko LIU, his surrealistic paintings are collages of his myriad ideas, inspirations, images and observations. A man of many interests, the artist recalls a childhood immersed in wild and boundless imaginations, expressed through the act of painting amidst a repressive environment. In Glary WU’s paintings, scenes and characters from daily life are presented on the canvas as individual scenes from a stage play. Revolving around trivial happenings and interactions between people, Wu’s paintings are rich in imagination and narrative quality, with special attention to the interactions between the various elements and characters on the pictorial surface and associations evoked from the scenes.

Gallery address: 3/F, 25 Hing Wo Street, Tin Wan, Aberdeen

Visual artist Chihoi’s solo exhibition in Hong Kong ‘Merry Christmas and Happy New Year’ features around 40 new oil paintings and a slide projection of the same images. Taking his personal old slide collection as the point of departure, Chihoi paints the wall projection of the slide images directly on canvas. The reproduced images illustrate familiar impressions of old Hong Kong between the 1960s and 1980s. The artist then turns these reproductions on canvas into slides and projects them. As time passes, memories are transferred and translated, eventually encapsulated in their original medium.

For Chihoi who grew up in the 1980s and 1990s, the Hong Kong in the old slides belongs to some other past, a time and space he never knew. Through a tourist’s perspective, the artist revisits old images and impressions. With the advance of imaging technology and the Internet, the slides, originally sold as souvenirs and not intended for the local people, now constitute a kind of shared memory of Hong Kong history, a missing puzzle piece to fill in the gaps of the otherwise not too complete memory. The faded old slides are left with a reddish colour, and the artist tries to reproduce this weathered, aged colour of the present: the vivid colours of neon lights have become mellow yet still enchant.

Gallery address: 3/F, 25 Hing Wo Street, Tin Wan, Aberdeen

Gallery EXIT is pleased to present Lulu NGIE’s latest solo exhibition ‘The Sensitive Body’. This is NGIE’s first solo exhibition since 2019, showcasing the artist's old and new oil and ink works on the body as a vessel for emotions and sensibilities, manifesting the various states of inward meditation and outward experience.

Quoted from the artist’s own statement about her creative process and exhibited works: ​​‘I always wonder how much I know about this body which I have been using for decades: Other than having different allergic reactions to certain drugs, foods, and substances at different points of my life, whenever I encounter certain situations that elicit emotions, my body also becomes allergic!

My emotions seem to be recorded somewhere in the body; an allergy attack happens whenever certain situations come up. And the most annoying thing of all is not being able to locate the source of the allergens!

Gallery address: 3/F, 25 Hing Wo Street, Tin Wan, Aberdeen

Gallery EXIT presents CHENG Ting Ting’s latest solo exhibition ‘Night Walk’, showcasing the artist’s new works created in the year since her return to Hong Kong after graduating from a master’s degree in Norway in 2021. During her two years of studying abroad in Norway, the artist experienced an environment, climate, and general atmosphere of life and creation entirely different from that in Hong Kong. The immense difference between the two places has caused a considerable impact on and transformation in Cheng’s creation. The relatively slow pace of life and creation in Norway allowed the artist to freely explore different directions and techniques of painting. The exhibition will open on Saturday 17 September, and will run till 22 October 2022.

Cheng’s works always unfold with chaotic brushstrokes and colour blocks, followed by the construction of interactions and interconnections between layers. In her previous works, viewers can identify certain things and narratives, while her new works tend to present a sense of general confusion, like the parts or afterimages of things. The paintings have been washed and painted over, until only some vaguely familiar silhouettes remain. Colours blend together, and underneath, details of the scene are hidden within the complex and chaotic brushstrokes, barely glimpsed by the viewer.

Gallery address: 3/F, 25 Hing Wo Street, Tin Wan, Aberdeen

Gallery EXIT presents LI Ning’s new solo exhibition ‘Welcome Jon Looka’, which revolves around a fictional village of the same name in a future world created by the artist and which means ‘going home’ in the Hakka dialect. Through a range of media such as mixed media prints, pencil on paper/canvas, ceramics and video, the artist leads the audience into this dystopian sci-fi landscape. The exhibition will open on Saturday 16 July, and will run till 20 August, 2022.

​​LI Ning’s works have always been narrative in nature, their images filled with all kinds of metaphorical imagery and symbols. Stylistically they incorporate elements of popular culture such as film, manga and animation, as well as myths and legends from all over the world. Since the artist’s graduation show in 2019, his works have always been based on this fictional world: Earlier works were collages of scattered images created by the artist where a sense of repetition existed among the many works of flattened images, while the works on show this time are more focused on an existing narrative between them, where the forms of creatures and characters are realised in a more three-dimensional way.

Gallery address: 3/F, 25 Hing Wo Street, Tin Wan, Aberdeen

Gallery EXIT is delighted to present Frank TANG Kai Yiu’s solo exhibition ‘You are here’, showcasing the artist’s works made between 2018 and 2022, in which are portrayed places and landmarks of Hong Kong through various mapping approaches and visual presentations. The works exhibited in this exhibition mainly revolve around the history, landscape and people’s lives of a place, where all kinds of relationships and emotions are woven by means of mapping and placed in the contexts of contemporary society and contemporary art. The exhibition will open on Saturday 11 June, and will run till 9 July, 2022.

Maps are worlds seen through the cartographer's eye, spaces represented in a specific way. They may be real or unreal, like the fictional worlds in myths and legends, folklore, hailed from the imagination of the creator. While objective facts are real, the creator’s observations of and feelings for a place are no less so, only becoming fictional when presented as works of art. In contemporary art there is no lack of works that take the ‘map’ as theme, or ‘mapping’ as creative trajectory or strategy. Through maps in different forms, artists all over the world explore and discuss contemporary issues such as racial conflicts, globalisation, ecology, body politics, identity and utopia. Encompassing a rich array of visual elements, maps can also be presented in many different forms.

Gallery address: 3/F, 25 Hing Wo Street, Tin Wan, Aberdeen

Gallery EXIT is pleased to present ‘Coo Cups ♡ Hong Kong’, the first solo exhibition of Caroline CHIU at the gallery. It will showcase more than 230 uniquely made porcelain cups in the form of installation. The exhibition will open on Saturday 11 June, and will run till 9 July, 2022.

‘Coo Cups’ is a project Chiu started in 2018 as an artistic exploration of the art form and material of porcelain vessels. The cups are available in limited numbers, each unique and hand-painted by Chiu. The series was first launched in ‘Shek-O Sublime’, a group exhibition at Gallery EXIT curated by Chiu in the same year. Chiu has been an avid collector of contemporary art and crafts for many years, while also practising as an artist and curator. Through the project, a symbol of her personal resilience during the past few years, Chiu wishes to express her love for Hong Kong and the art community.

Gallery address: 3/F, 25 Hing Wo Street, Tin Wan, Aberdeen

Gallery EXIT is pleased to present Hong Kong Time Rift, the first solo exhibition of Daphné Mandel at the gallery. The exhibition will showcase the artist’s assembled imagery reflecting Hong Kong’s past and present through a series of new mixed media works on paper and videos, inspired by the artist’s recent explorations of Hong Kong’s hidden ruins and abandoned properties forgotten in the passage of time.

French but born in Lausanne, Switzerland, Daphné Mandel grew up in Paris and has been living and working in Hong Kong for many years. Mandel is trained in the fields of architecture, landscape architecture, and urban planning. Hong Kong Time Rift fantasises the evanescent ruins where the boundaries between present and past are blurred. It is a rift in time and space, a leap forward into the past. It is a homage to Hong Kong’s paradoxical juxtaposition of innumerous ruins and rampant urbanisation. The inability to travel out of Hong Kong for an extended period of time due to the COVID pandemic in turn enabled the artist to explore the city in depth, leading to a further discovery of the myriad nooks and crannies of the city the artist once thought she already knew.

Gallery address: 3/F, 25 Hing Wo Street, Tin Wan, Aberdeen

For the first time at Gallery EXIT, Lau Siu Chung exhibits a new series of large-scale oil paintings, created from everyday sceneries around the artist, who has captured his impressions of the momentous urban landscapes and street happenings, bringing a unique viewing experience with constantly changing lines and layered compositions.

Let’s go somewhere, as suggested by the exhibition title, is about the artist’s personal travel experience, and how living in a busy city, he has a particular yearning for nature in the countryside due to recent changes in the mode of travel as a result of the pandemic.

Some of the works are based on the Hong Kong cityscape inhabited by the artist, whose persona often figures in the paintings, leading the viewers into the busy streets from a first-person perspective. At the same time, natural elements such as trees and parks are constant motifs in the artist’s creation.

Gallery address: 3/F, 25 Hing Wo Street, Tin Wan, Aberdeen

Dony Cheng Hung has a talent for observing the various forms of light and shadow that appear within the urban structure. The artist considers the linkage between ‘light’ and ‘space’ in the urban landscape, and the changes that affect their visual manifestation and transformation in the passage of time. Using a combination of soft pastel, charcoal, acrylic and colour ink, Cheng creates smooth painted surfaces, in the space of which emerges all kinds of refracted light and light sources that can be found everywhere.
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​​The spaces and details in Cheng’s works are all drawn from real life, from places the artist frequents or observes on a daily basis. Yet the familiar details in the real world, such as the forms of buildings, signs, objects, material textures, etc. are all erased from the painting, so that the pictorial world becomes an abstract, dematerialised static space.

Gallery address: 3/F, 25 Hing Wo Street, Tin Wan, Aberdeen