The definition of a place coincides with architecture; transliterating market into mar-git, two meeting and bonding together—an intimate relationship. A special bird call at 5 AM accompanied her over there in Phnom Penh. Gobble, gobble, om, om. Taking nine steps to the south on the balcony, sitting by an unknown corner table, observing a long line of ants on their sugar hunt; collecting fruit-skins that curled up in distinctive gestures; a disoriented mosquito, sucking blood, landing on a familiar skin—this act of pausing achieved a balance between movement and stillness. The experience of living together in Phnom Penh allowed them to re-examine the ways in which one may participate in creation. To be caught in an unfamiliar environment can indeed, at first, sharpen one’s perception, but cultural differences, language barriers, and the discomfort and anxiety that comes with the climate interfered on a daily basis; one had to also be mindful of the etiquette and emotional restraint that come with living with others. In an environment of unending heat, an environment of production and material scarcity, the will to create was held back by mundane tasks, and every participant was dealing with a unique emotional challenge. The place where they have lived together, its length, its humidity, its light and shadow change from one hour to the next; its animals, its winds, its some places may refer to a mood, a sound, or a smell, rather than a physical space.

Participating artists: Yu Ji, Casey Robbins, Ho King Man, Boat Zhang, Kojiro Kobayashi

Opening: Fri, 13 December, 6 – 8 PM

Gallery address: 10 Sik On Street, Wanchai

Kiang Malingue is pleased to present “Spa & Beauty”, an exhibition by Geumhyung Jeong. The exhibition that runs from 7th through 14th December coincides with two performances by the artist, featuring humanised objects, props, videos and a number of sundries used in daily routines.

Jeong’s body of work ranges from performance, dance, choreography, theatre, video and installation. Since the beginning of her career, she has been investigating the relationship between the human body, the objects that are immediately associated with it, and its artificial counterparts through productions that combine languages and techniques from the fields of contemporary dance, puppet theatre, self-taught programming, and the visual arts. In the course of the physical interaction between her body and the objects, it becomes ambiguous who controls whom, blurring the line between inanimate and animate, the inauthentic and the genuine.

The two scheduled performances on the 7th and 14th of December are effectively a series of demonstrations, in which the artist, treating her body as a medium par excellence, activates the modern artefacts by using them in particular, even idiosyncratic ways, shedding light on the sprays, bottles, bathtubs, and the pleasure of consuming and touching.

Opening: Sat, 7 Dec, 4 – 6 PM

Performance: 7 Dec, 4 PM, 14 Dec, 4 PM

Gallery address: 13/F, Blue Box Factory Building, 25 Hing Wo Street, Aberdeen

Kiang Malingue is pleased to present at its Tin Wan space an exhibition of drawings by Jin Mei. This is the first comprehensive exhibition of more than 150 drawings by the artist, tracing the origin and developments of Jin Mei’s drawing practice since 2015. The exhibition is accompanied by an essay written by Jin Mei’s daughter Chang Yuchen, who acted as the editor of the artist’s recent publication, jm.

Opening: Sat, 26 Oct, 3 – 6 PM

Gallery address: 13/F, Blue Box Factory Building, 25 Hing Wo Street, Aberdeen

Kiang Malingue is pleased to present “Daydreams”, an exhibition of Su-Mei Tse’s sculptural and photographic works. It is the artist’s second exhibition with the gallery since “Elegy” in 2017, featuring around twenty recent works finely placed in the space of Kiang Malingue’s Sik On building.

For Tse, the formation of daydreams is a personal sharing of the everyday life, and a sensitive operation that is particularly poetic and substantial in relation to the world’s reality today. “It helps me to handle the everyday experience and to deal with suffering in the world by shifting the view and weaving the vulnerable material into my artistic process.” Against overwhelming waves of negative news, threats and crises, daydreaming and the pursuit of poetry could be regarded as a vital practice, empowering an individual by offering alternative perspectives and a sheltered space of one’s own.

Opening reception: Thur, 24 October, 6 – 8 PM

Gallery address: 10 Sik On Street, Wanchai

Kiang Malingue is pleased to present “I See You There”, Yeung Hok Tak’s second exhibition with the gallery after “What A Big Smoke Ring” in 2022. Showcasing nineteen new paintings at the gallery’s Tin Wan 12/F space, Yeung balances lyricism and cynicism on canvas by depicting a variety of characters, landscapes and stories that are nostalgic, amusing and affectionate.

In the last fifteen years, Yeung has developed a unique painting practice that incorporates his rich experience as a comic book author. Dealing with a variety of subjects—such as absurd turns of events on the streets, lonely and defiant figures against epically silent backgrounds, or fantasy stories and fables in which animals and action figures play prominent roles—Yeung’s exuberant paintings explore intimate emotions, treasured memories, and complex relationships between people and places.

Opening: Sat, 21 Sept, 3 – 6 PM

Gallery address: 12/F, Blue Box Factory Building, 25 Hing Wo Street, Aberdeen

Kiang Malingue presents “Geopoetics regarding a waterless sea”, Nabuqi’s third exhibition with the gallery. Based on an eponymous novel by author Chen Si’an written for this exhibition, Nabuqi has created a new body of sculptures and installations that investigates the changes of time, memory, spirituality and faith, the distinction between land and sea, and the intertextual relationship between literature and sculpture.

Nabuqi collaborated with Chen for the first time on the occasion of the Beijing Biennial in 2022, producing a distinct series of sculptures including Thread, and Symmetry (Residence and Tomb) based on a perusal of The Flame Within, an anthology of Chen’s short stories. The foundation of the current exhibition is a structured collaboration: Nabuqi first commissioned Chen to create a chaptered novel after conducting research in Hong Kong; she then conceived a new body of work that in turn became the starting point from which Chen expanded the novel. The exhibition’s title is derived from the novel, and the individual artworks are also named after the chapters and elements that appear in the literature. Nabuqi’s long-term practice is characterized by a concern for the diverse literary traditions of China and Europe—from The Black Dwarf by Walter Scott to Autumn Night by Lu Xun—the current exhibition of “Geopoetics regarding a waterless sea” is another attempt to nurture forms with words, and to rewrite stories sculpturally.

Opening: Thur, 12 September, 6 – 8 PM

Gallery address: 10 Sik On Street, Wanchai

1. From afar, Dominique Knowles’ paintings look like soft animal hide I could sink my face into. “Just go by what you experience and feel,” he says when I ask how I should approach his art. Swathes of afternoon orange, marred by flecks of black like small slits of the void. A featureless being plunging face-first into an icy pool. Knitted walls that open up to a sky, blue as a balm against the encroaching fire. A stain of blood against a blinding canvas of light. That these works are titled My beloved only adds to the unease. What was it that he was mourning? What was I mourning?

Opening: Thursday, 18 July, 6 – 8 PM

Gallery address: 10 Sik On Street, Wanchai

Kiang Malingue is pleased to announce a display of three sets of Zheng Bo’s “Drawing Life” works on paper on the 12th floor of its Tin Wan space. The new iterations of Drawing Life (Beginning of Spring), Drawing Life (Rain Water), and Drawing Life (Waking of Insects), all made in 2022, bind the individual works in the form of traditional Chinese art albums, emphasising the intimacy and counter-encyclopedic aspect of Zheng Bo’s drawing practice.

Since 2020, Zheng Bo has been creating an ongoing series of “Drawing Life” drawings by visiting their plant neighbors up the hills behind their village on Lantau Island and sketching them. For Zheng Bo, drawing means spending time getting to know the plants. They describe how this peaceful practice “feels like a meditation.” The title of the series inverts the conventional artistic practice of life drawing in which people are depicted, signaling instead how Zheng Bo focuses their attention beyond the human.

Gallery address: 12/F, Blue Box Factory Building, 25 Hing Wo Street, Aberdeen

Kiang Malingue is pleased to present Fabien Mérelle's solo exhibition at their Sik On Street gallery space, featuring a series of intricate ink and watercolour drawings as well as sculptural works.

Fabien Mérelle is a highly talented, French artist, living and working in Paris, who creates delicately detailed drawings in black ink and watercolour. A graduate of the Beaux-Arts Academy in Paris, Mérelle received a scholarship in 2005 to attend the Beaux-Arts Academy in Xi'an, China. This trans-global opportunity enabled Mérelle to discover and perfect the use of alternative Eastern drawing techniques, such as Chinese ink. Upon his return from Asia, Mérelle was granted a residence at the prestigious Casa de Vélazquez in Madrid and in 2010 he was the first winner of the highly lauded Canson Prize. Receiving international recognition, Mérelle's exquisite work has been exhibited at The Armory Show, New York and Art Paris among other locations. His work can be found in several private and public collections, including the Daniel & Florence Guerlain Contemporary Art Foundation in Paris.

Gallery address: 10 Sik On Street, Wanchai

Kiang Malingue presents Zheng Zhou’s fourth exhibition with the gallery “Spanish Grilled Fish”, showcasing more than ten paintings completed between 2019 and 2023.

Zheng has continued in recent years to base his painterly creations on free movements of brilliant colours, seeking visions and signs from the interplay of the paint and the canvas in a manner similar to ancient Chinese divination practices. When painting, Zheng is less concerned with representing fragments of reality or producing a predetermined scene, than with observing the free flow of paint on self-stretched canvases, before discerning in the splashes and drips human figures, animals, plants, atmospheres and stories. For Zheng, the proper act of painting is, instead of the actual mark-making process, the viewing experience in the studio, which might last up to six months. He constantly and repeatedly examines the paintings in different stages, adding new elements that can be either harmonious or unsettling, rendering richly textured, fabulous scenes.

Opening reception: Thur, 16 May, 6 – 8 PM

Gallery address: 10 Sik On Street, Wanchai

The body is falling. Between the gusts of wind and the way that buildings soar past them as they plummet, this feeling is unlike anything else they’ve ever felt. With outstretched limbs, they reached for something to define this feeling, wondering if grace sounded right. There is a pool of blood slowly expanding outwards from the back of their head. The body is a sight to behold. The body is, slowly but surely, being opened up, the fragments of what kept it together made viscerally clear.  It is more than just blood that seeps out of the wound; it is the soul, the self that they constructed for themselves. Each drop of blood another fragment of someone who no longer knows where they’re going. All they know, all they can hold on to, is where they’ve been, who they became. Seeing red, they hope that they might become, again. The fall was just the beginning, and even that dull thud didn’t hurt as much as what comes next; that impulsive, desperate scrawl, the digging deep, of being put back together again.

Opening: Sat, 11 May, 4 – 7 PM

Gallery address: 12/F, Blue Box Factory Building, 25 Hing Wo Street, Aberdeen

For "anus whisper", inspired by Georges Bataille's The Solar Anus, Wong Ping presents the three-channel video installation Crumbling Earwax (2022), and blah-blah-blah (2022)—a large-scale installation that fires ping-pong balls into an ear sculpture—first shown in the major exhibition "Earwax" at Times Art Center Berlin in 2022.

Also included in the exhibition is a new performative installation that involves a fart-like trumpet performance heard through a sculpted anus. In "anus whisper", Wong continues to compose a tumultuous narrative of sound in relation to the otolithic, the annulus, and the erotic.

Opening | 3-9pm

Performance | 7:30-7:32pm

Gallery address: 10 Sik On Street, Wan Chai

“When I visited Hong Kong in the first summer after the pandemic, seeing all the cargo ships plying the sea, the flowers swaying in the urban parks, and the crowds overwhelming the streets, it was as if Hong Kong had remained unchanged in the flux of history. But as I walked in the evening breeze, the smell of Hong Kong and the subtropical flowers along the roadside gave off an extraordinarily vibrant flavour. ‘Before eyeing this flower, the two of you remain in tranquility; as you come for a view of the flower, it is at once brightened and elucidated, and then you know that the flower is not outside of your heart’. One could read Wang Yangming’s text on the immanent blossom through the flowers of Hong Kong. When I thought about and looked at flowers and plants in Hong Kong, I also realised that this flower-heart relationship is also comparable to my day-to-day artistic labour in relation to my constant review of the reconstructed images. These paintings, which have been detached from me and exist independently, are both frozen and animated in time, and are both outside and inside of my heart, just like those mesmerising flowers that made me stop as they danced in the night winds”.

—Liu Xiaohui

Kiang Malingue is pleased to present “Flowers of Hong Kong”, Liu Xiaohui’s first solo exhibition in Hong Kong, showcasing twenty sets of oil and tempera paintings. A number of the artworks in the exhibition were created when Liu was the artist-in-residence at Kiang Malingue in 2023. The recent paintings in various sizes combine the artist’s newly found interest in flowers; long-term fascination with the human body in action; a focus on the solitary female figure, and an experience of identifying with the external world triggered by the environment of Hong Kong.

Opening: Sat, 23 March, 3 – 6 PM

Gallery address: 13/F, Blue Box Factory Building, 25 Hing Wo Street, Aberdeen

Kiang Malingue is pleased to present at its Tin Wan studio space lucid / liquid / limpid, Carrie Yamaoka’s first exhibition with the gallery, also the artist’s first exhibition in Asia. Carrie Yamaoka is a New York-based visual artist whose work spans painting, sculpture, photography and drawing. Featuring mostly recent works and including some works that date back to 2009, the exhibition provides a glimpse of the artist’s handling of material, process and reflectivity, in an evolving body of work that revels in transformation and flux.

Yamaoka’s work wrestles with the viewer’s desire to search for an image—”I want the viewer to lurk in that limbo, that place before an image is arrived at.”

Opening: Sat, 23 March, 3-6pm

Gallery address: 12/F, Blue Box Factory Building, 25 Hing Wo Street, Aberdeen

Kiang Malingue is pleased to present “These Things”, an exhibition of recent paintings by Chang Ya Chin. This is the artist’s first exhibition in her hometown Hong Kong, focusing on depicting a variety of local food and delicacies in the manner of classical still life.

Having received rigorous training in academic and classical traditions in Florence, Paris, and New York since 2015, Chang makes modestly-sized, placid compositions in which contemporary objects are in contrast with traditional methods and techniques of still life. All of her paintings are painted from real life: be it a group of pears, a bugle, a bowl of rice or a game of Tetris, Chang closely studies the distinctly textured objects—effectively “casting” the objects as actors and performers—before rendering them tangible and verisimilar on canvas.

Opening reception: Sat, 20 Jan, 3 – 6 PM

Gallery address: 12/F, Blue Box Factory Building, 25 Hing Wo Street, Aberdeen

Kiang Malingue is pleased to present “For Caution”, an exhibition of new work by Phillip Lai. This is the London-based artist’s second solo exhibition with the gallery.

Over the past three decades, Phillip Lai has developed a sculptural language which explores approaches to the ubiquitous materials and experiences that derive from a techno-industrial culture – such as that of mass production, functionality, the mechanistic, automation, ergonomics, infrastructure. Its basis refers to our psychological interactions in this culture, as well as an intermingling with it. Transfers or retentions of energy are envisioned, through materials and objects that often suggest the support of basic daily functions, needs and the sustaining of human life.

Preview: Sat, 9 December, 3 – 6 PM

Gallery address: 10 Sik On Street, Wanchai

Kiang Malingue is pleased to present “Not retrospective”, showcasing less than 40 previous and recent sculptures, photographs and videos by Kwan Sheung Chi. Playing for the third time—after Kwan’s debut exhibition “A Retrospective of Kwan Sheung Chi” in 2002 and “100 things, a little retrospective” in 2012—with the idea of mounting a retrospective, a form of exhibition that emphasises comprehensiveness, totalised coherency, reinterpretation, canonisation and belatedness, the presentation includes important early works such as five videos from the “ONE MILLION” series, a number of curious everyday objects from the project of “Well, you can have what’s left of mine.”, “I am Artist” books made twenty years ago, and a suite of videos and installations made in 2023.

For Kwan, conceiving “Not retrospective” does not entail the need to revisit old works, but accommodates the desire to “get rid of them.” Previous works take up physical and conceptual space, and have effectively become a burden. In relation to the common practice of cataloguing one’s work and belongings before leaving Hong Kong for good in recent years, Kwan is also interested in discovering whether old works can generate new market value, constructing the first part of “Not retrospective” as a store in pure white. Sculptural works and curious objects such as an iron horse in the literal sense that was made in the absence of an original (Iron Horse –– After Antonio Mak, 2008/2020); a whetstone that was disguised as a strangely shaped cigarette pack (Marlboro, 2015); and the artist’s sweat elegantly bottled (L’art s’évapore (formerly known as ‘Eau dévoilé’), 2023/2012)—all cheerfully foreground the commodity status of the individual pieces, readily stocked along with a banner piece that made use of dust jackets of Marx’s three volumes of Capital (Karl Marx’s Capital, 2015), and the “ONE MILLION” series of money-counting videos.

Gallery address: 13/F, Blue Box Factory Building, 25 Hing Wo Street, Aberdeen

Kiang Malingue is pleased to present “Meanwhile”, an exhibition of Homer Shew’s recent portraits. This is the New York-based artist’s second exhibition in Hong Kong since Backgrounds in 2021, including a number of portraits based on the same sitter years after the first portraits were made, adding a poignant temporal dimension to the artworks. Focusing on depicting Asian Americans, Shew continues to explore the social fabric and contiguous elements of the community as individuals inside it continue to grow and change.
 
Shew made a portrait for Pulitzer Prize winner Hua Hsu in 2021, whom he admires as an exceptional Asian American writer. For the current exhibition, Shew created Hua Hsu II(2023), an organic development from the previous portrait. Hsu is seen once again donning a Hawaiian shirt — a fortuitous opportunity for Shew to fully express his liking for plants and leaves — in a relaxed, sitting pose, calmly looking away from the viewer as he is engaged in a friendly conversation. In a strange and playful way, the depiction moves away from a classic Asian American portrait that emphasises racial features to a portrayal that obfuscates the racial identity of the sitter: Hsu’s skin tone darkens under the sun and the awning shade while his hair attains a dramatic jaggedness that echoes the arboreal elements in the background, eyes lit and widened with sincerity and enthusiasm. No longer frozen in a staged pose, Hsu is here naturally integrated with his surrounding environment, at once metamorphosing into and out of the New York streetscape behind. Hua Hsu II shows that the writer has not changed but has for the artist become an endearing subject who goes beyond the necessity of racial descriptions.

Opening: Sat, 28 Oct, 3 – 6 PM

Gallery address: 12/F, Blue Box Factory Building, 25 Hing Wo Street, Aberdeen

Kiang Malingue is pleased to present an exhibition of the late Cho Yong-Ik’s (1934-2023) abstract paintings created in the last five years. Recognised as a leading figure in Korean abstract painting, Cho produced a series of vibrant paintings after his exhibition at Edouard Malingue Gallery, Hong Kong in 2016, continuing to explore the haptic and spiritual dimensions of art, concluding a remarkable, ever-deepening oeuvre that first made its international appearance in the 1960s.

For the new body of work, Cho applied signature painting methods such as scratching — gently peeling off the top layer of paint with his thumb, a dry brush or a knife to reveal the alter undertone — freely oscillating between the celebrated “Wave” and “Bamboo” series to reexamine structural and semantic associations between the independent series. While the painting processes and the matrix-making marks were just as rigorous and porous as earlier series, the palette became increasingly lively and robust: in his eighties, Cho made extensive use of unprecedentedly saturated indigo, aquamarine, crimson, turquoise and olive alike, measuring the different ways in which the dashing, permeable white marks — constant yet always unique — take form against a highly contrasting surface.

Preview: Thur, 26 October, 6 – 8 PM

Gallery address: 10 Sik On Street, Wanchai

Kiang Malingue is pleased to present “The House in the Trees”, showcasing a suite of eight drawings on paper by New York-based artist Kyung-Me. This is the artist’s first exhibition with the gallery. Further developing a drawing practice that deals with haunting symmetries, ouroboric infinities, embedded narratives composed of designs, furniture pieces and curios from different cultures and times, Kyung-Me considers the potential of mise-en-abymestructures in relation to the ways in which individuals form their own psychic prisons.
 
Since 2015, Kyung-Me (b. 1991, lives and works in New York, NY) has been creating intricate works on paper that combine and subvert artistic traditions such as handscroll or emakimono, and Western technical drawing by emphasising the labyrinthine and psychological aspects of architectural environments. Pivoting from making drawings of parallel projection to mapping a perspective that produce mirror effects along the centre, Kyung-Me created for the exhibition “Sister” in New York in 2022 a suite of eight lavish drawings set in two distinct institutions: monastery, and geisha lodging home (okiya). The drawings feature female figures that are as solemn and paralysed as the shrouded chambers, flawlessly decorated in order to reveal the uncannily organic that disturbs and collapses.

Opening reception: Thur, 26 October, 6 – 8 PM

Gallery address: 10 Sik On Street, Wanchai

Kiang Malingue is pleased to present “Savage winds, a land of stone, Forsaken intelligence, left alone,” an exhibition of Miao Ying’s latest simulations and paintings. This is the artist’s first exhibition with the gallery. The exhibition continues Miao Ying’s exploration of digital assets in the broader sense—visuals, sounds, special CG effects, gestures and data that have been radically owned, shared and misappropriated in the virtual world—identifying artificial intelligence as a type of digital asset par excellence, a modern alchemy that functions as a black box beyond its creator’s control.
 
Technomancy at Polarized Rift (2023) and Technomancy at Lava pit (2023) are two simulations that depict evolving landscapes, continuously conjuring from a stationary point of view an array of digital readymades: generic, pre-made assets such as epic landscapes, environmental objects and special effects used in many existing games. Spontaneously, audio is generated as poems written by GPT describing the rugged landscape features, fantasy political spells, and technomancy spells are being read by an AI trained in a British accent. The title of the exhibition derives from one such spell that appeared in Technomancy at Polarized Rift. Highlighted is the relationship between magic-ideological incantations and happenings on screen, grounding predestined causality in a randomised cacophony.

Opening reception Sat, 07 Oct, 3 – 6 PM

Gallery address: 13/F, Blue Box Factory Building, 25 Hing Wo Street, Aberdeen

Kiang Malingue is pleased to present on the twelfth floor of its Tin Wan studio space “Just Arrived in This World”, an exhibition of new paintings by Cui Xinming. The painter’s fourth solo exhibition with the gallery features more than a dozen oil paintings on wood board and canvas, expanding themes and series developed in the exhibition “Differentiation” in 2018. The artist’s sincere yet surreal depictions of everyday scenes with absurd elements respond to the profound impact on life by recent global and local crises.

Cui Xinming’s early painting practice revolved around theatrical narratives by highlighting the contrast between thematic, fiery elements in crimson or faded red and glooming backgrounds that were frigid and sombre. Long-term series such as Black Hole of Memories from 2011 and Sleepwalker from 2013 are exemplary of the artist’s intent to reflect psychological tension by building highly detailed architectural environments in which an isolated community is caught. For the exhibition “Differentiation” in 2018, Cui created a group of paintings organised in pairs, examining dichotomised relationships such as ancient—modern; exposed—concealed; lucid—chaotic, measuring the possibility of reconciling Chinese classical thought with western artistic traditions.

Opening reception: Sat, 16 Sep, 3 – 6 PM

Gallery address: 12/F, Blue Box Factory Building, 25 Hing Wo Street, Aberdeen

Kiang Malingue is pleased to present at its Sik On street gallery space an exhibition of recent paintings and works on paper by Yuan Fang, Yirui Jia, Liu Yin and Homer Shew.
 
Yuan Fang’s Galloping belongs to a recent series of large-scale paintings, dealing with the increasing intimacy between the canvas and the space in which the artist creates. Evident of a gestural process that involves speedy choreographic movements, the inky artwork depicts abstract forms that resemble curling whirlwinds; red, green and white slashes ominously gather and shatter, confusing the subject and the ground of the painting. Just as many of Fang’s multilayered abstract paintings, the intense, tumultuous surface of Gallopingbuilds upon erasures and paint-overs, leaving faint traces of previous compositions that had become unwieldy. However, unlike many of Fang’s other paintings that are concerned with a sense of depth — the Marching series from 2022, for example — Galloping proliferates laterally, tearing apart any semblance of visual perspective along with the very integrity of the canvas itself. In comparison, Fang’s two untitled charcoal drawings demonstrate a monochrome clarity that is grounded in gravitational and aquatic realities, serving as an prelude to any emotionally charged, unruly escalations.

Gallery address: 10 Sik On Street, Wanchai

Kiang Malingue is pleased to present at its Tin Wan gallery space Truong Cong Tung’s exhibition 2000 years…Something on coming – Something on going, the artist’s first solo exhibition with the gallery, coinciding with the artist’s exhibition at Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (June 10–September 10, 2023). Introducing new iterations of an ongoing series of sculptures and a central video project debuted a decade ago, Journey of a Piece of Soil, Truong revisits crucial motifs, examining the temporal aspect of materialised entities and movements.

For more than a decade, Truong as both an independent artist and a member of the Art Labor collective is recognised for his profound interest in history, landscape and materiality. Emphasising the earthen quality of his materials, the meticulously sculpted artworks are delicate yet solid relics, tracing the passage through which the past and the future are connected. Regarding Truong’s art in relation to the confrontation between “territory of sacred places and spirits…and another set of beliefs based on the rhetoric of modernity and prosperity, built by the State and by private development companies,” Caroline Ha Thuc, in the curatorial statement of the 2018 exhibition Constructing Mythologies: “Truong’s installation and sculptures embody this cultural confrontation, combining hybrid found objects made of newly sacralised elements and natural parts, mingling local cosmologies with imposed technologies. His work is deeply informed by the traditional values of his native region of the Central Highlands in Vietnam.” The total installation 2000 years…Something on coming – Something on going consists of four individual sculptures first made appearance in the 2018 exhibition: Terra; From the primitive to the civilized; From a land long lost to a land dwindling; and Forming deforming ongoing.

Gallery address: 12/F, Blue Box Factory Building, 25 Hing Wo Street, Aberdeen

Kiang Malingue is pleased to present at its Sik On street space It’s a quiet thing, Lai Chih-Sheng’s exhibition that directly negotiates with the architecture of the space. By presenting a series of site-specific installations and interventions, the exhibition in its totality examines Kiang Malingue’s headquarters opened in the second half of 2022, configuring an environment that is ephemeral and poetic. It emphasises the confrontational relationship between the actor, the observer and the architecture, while reflecting upon the physical and ideological limitations and potentials of an exhibition. Lai freely applies a singular perception of space that he has developed over the last three decades, expressing by staging seemingly barren scenes conceptual generosity, in relation to urban, architectural and human conditions today.

Named after Morgana King’s song It’s a quiet thing from the 1960s, the exhibition transforms via a series of spatial interventions the boundary between quietness and noise into the figure of a mosquito: after appropriately conditioning the second floor white cube space, the artist leaves it entirely to the insect. Lai: “Regarding the subtle quietness, the barely noticeable… is there anything hidden in it? One of the most common noises or nuisances in life is probably the discovery of little insects like mosquitos around you. As soon as there is one, people start confronting the air and the space, with their hearing and sight heightened, becoming evermore sensitive. This seemingly feeble threat in a realistic way amplifies our perception of a lived space; we fear that in the blink of an eye the mosquito could have it. Of course, once we are done with it, on the other hand, we get to feel a particularly rewarding satisfaction.”

Gallery address: 10 Sik On Street, Wanchai

Kiang Malingue is pleased to present at its Tin Wan studio spaces Contraflow, showcasing recent paintings, lenticular prints, performative sculptures, installations and videos by Tromarama. The artist collective continues exploring the significance of the digital economy, the intersection of play and labour, retrieving traces of the personal and the intimate amidst data and statistics, as they reveal the infrastructures of social media, the production of happiness and simulated joy.

The titular piece Contraflow is a troupe of Himalayan salt lamps. Allegedly purificatory and good for nurturing a meditative state, the lamps scattered along the wall are activated by tweets that use hashtag #power, performing blinking dances choreographed by a binary code-translating machine. Representative of Tromarama’s longstanding interest in re-assessing the link between the analogue and the digital, the performative lamps shed a spectacular yet intimate light on other artworks that physicalise speculations.

Gallery address: 12 & 13/F, Blue Box Factory Building, 25 Hing Wo Street, Aberdeen

Kiang Malingue is pleased to present entangled traces, disremembered landscapes, Tiffany Chung’s first solo exhibition in Hong Kong. Opening alongside Rising Sun: Artists in an Uncertain America at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts Museum (PAFA), which has commissioned Chung a new series of works, the exhibition at Kiang Malingue features recent and related projects by the internationally acclaimed artist including a number of new cartographic works and a new 3-channel video installation. By tracing the entanglements of nature, culture, colonialism, war, and state-making, and introducing pivotal temporal aspects to the act of mapping, Chung continues her ever-deepening exploration of geopolitics, history, and memory, marking critical shifts in historical narratives.

Gallery address: 10 Sik On Street, Wanchai

Kiang Malingue is pleased to present Beech, Pine, Fern, Acacia, Zheng Bo’s solo exhibition at the gallery’s Tin Wan space. For the first time, Zheng Bo groups together four “biophilia films” in one space — Pteridophilia (2016-), The Political Life of Plants (2020-), Le Sacre du printemps (2021-), and Samur (2023) — tracing the myriad trajectories through which their artistic practice has evolved in the last decade.

Zheng Bo’s four film projects have been unfolding in four distinct ecological situations: Pteridophilia in a subtropical forest with lush ferns outside Taipei; The Political Life of Plants in an old-growth beech forest near Berlin; Le Sacre du printemps in a primeval pine forest in Dalarna, Sweden; Samur in the Arabian desert with a single umbrella thorn acacia tree.

Zheng Bo began the Pteridophilia series in 2016. As the first project in the ambitious “biophilia films” framework, Pteridophiliaconnects queer people and queer plants by imagining close contacts between humans and ferns. The participants cultivate deep emotional and physical relations with the plants: making love to them, trying out BDSM acts, and bonding with fiddleheads and spores. The stunningly sensual Pteridophilia series provided the foundation upon which later “biophilia films” have expanded.

Gallery address: 13/F, Blue Box Factory Building, 25 Hing Wo Street, Aberdeen

Kiang Malingue is pleased to present Liu Yin’s solo exhibition “Spring” at its Tin Wan gallery space in Hong Kong, featuring a series of paintings and watercolours created in the past two years. Known for developing a painting practice that puts Shōjo manga-inspired cute faces on public figures in academic or political fields, pop culture characters and inanimate objects, Liu reveals and reshapes the emotional and narrative structures that operate within complex events. The theme of “Spring” casually alludes to Botticelli’s masterpiece, presenting a series of landscapes and still lifes that add large, crystalline eyes and adorable faces to flowers, plants, fruits and skulls. The recent artworks further the artist’s interest in transforming the mundane, revealing the subversive potential of female gaze, and the surging tide of emotion that corresponds to the complexities of our time.

The centrepiece of the exhibition is Wind, a large-scale painting rendering a group scene of rose-figures, along with a number of smaller rose portraits. This series of rose-figures depicts difficult situations of conflict: unlike the other works in the exhibition which make direct use of cheerful springtime colours and portray the tranquil existence of organic life forms, Liu’s roses unleash intense, aggressive emotions: fury, sadness, cries and struggles in the midst of grim storms. The fragile, bodiless rose-figures are overwhelmed, petals falling, swaying in the darkness of the dramatic scenes. Liu’s depiction evokes an “awakening” that is a far cry from its Western political counterpart, re-examining the aesthetic and political values of Shōjo manga and the significance of masquerade on collective and individual levels.
Marked by the two “kissing roses” paintings is the other end of the emotional spectrum of the “Spring” exhibition, allowing the rose-lovers to face each other, closing their restless eyes — both the profile of a face and the closure of eyes are relatively rare in Liu’s art, creating a tension with the romantic atmosphere. The quirky Bananas and the idyllic Two Pears are queer yet familiar, depicting the reality of the post-human condition in a seemingly light-hearted manner. Strawberry! Blueberry! Blackberry! and Mint! is inspired not only by the famous Bocca della Verità, but also by a replica of it somewhere in Japan, used as a backdrop for fashion photography.

Gallery address: 12/F, Blue Box Factory Building, 25 Hing Wo Street, Aberdeen