Aura Within

Luis Chan (1905 – 1995) was a largely self-taught Hong Kong artist who bridged traditional and modern practices. Known in the 1930s to 1950s as the ‘King of Watercolour’ for his lively English landscape style, he later embraced a dramatic shift. By the late 1960s, his paintings evolved into vibrant dreamscapes that portrayed the subconscious life of the city and the inner psyche of the post-war generation. Chan also played a key role in shaping Hong Kong’s modern art scene in his capacity as a writer and critic From his first solo exhibition in 1933 to his final one in 1993, he mounted 47 solo shows and published numerous essays on contemporary art. Born in Panama in 1905 to Cantonese parents, Chan moved to Hong Kong in 1910, where he lived and worked until his death in 1995.

Nicole Coson works in printmaking, video, and sculpture, exploring the process of image-making as it pertains to personal memory, history, and material culture. Coson’s printed canvases oscillate delicately between surface and depth; by integrating symbolically-loaded found objects into the etching press, the concrete material culture transforms into analog, indexical images through their negative imprint. This oscillation between pattern, image and object is embraced by Coson to tell stories of family, society and coloniality, but never in straight-forward ways. Rather, the artist is deeply committed to the aesthetic politics of opacity and by extension, privacy, secrecy and intimacy. Rather than alluding to a hidden meaning behind her barrier motifs (camouflage patterns, window blinds, woven baskets, food crates), Coson invites us to study them as such—barriers—and the critical potential of visual obfuscation. Born in 1992 in Manila, Coson lives and works in London.

Tetsumi Kudo’s (1935 – 1990) four-decade practice explored mass consumption, technology, colonialism, racism and environmental decay through biomorphic sculptures and found-object assemblages. Active in Japan’s avant-garde and France’s Nouveau Réalisme, he critiqued political conformity and consumerism. After winning the 1962 Pan-Pacific prize, Kudo moved to Paris, creating works combining plastic dolls, circuitry and natural elements in 'New Ecology' compositions that blurred boundaries between technology, nature and humanity. His art reflects a transcultural view, drawing on Japanese tradition and Western modernism. Born in 1935 in Osaka, Kudo regularly returned to Japan from Paris in the 1980s to teach until his death in 1990.

Peng Ke both works with images and writes, her experimental practice wandering between images from photography books and personal experiences from reality. Peng explores the experience of living in the fast-developing urban environment, such as small cities in China. One can peek into the colorful corners of these rural cities through the finely tuned images captured by Ke’s lens. Peng's primary concern is with the relationship between the human condition of urban spaces and the collective experiences of the people there. In her photographs, the tasteful colors, charming forms, strange outlines and varied textures of the indoor and outdoor daily scenes of China, among other places in Asia, are vividly and incisively displayed in their very original forms. Born in 1992 in Changsha, Peng lives and works between Los Angeles and Shanghai.

Zhang Enli uses the outside world as a mirror to document the prosaic aspects of daily life, employing everyday objects like string or marble balls. He often magnifies these subjects, capturing fragments as if through a camera lens. His figurative works distort perspective to emphasize form and meaning, combining expressive brushwork influenced by traditional Chinese painting with pencil-drawn grids. In his immersive Space Paintings, Zhang paints directly onto walls, creating environments that range from abstract to figurative. His recent works, anchored in figuration, aim to capture the essence of his subjects, fusing memory, emotion and imagination. Born in 1965 in Jilin, Zhang lives and works in Shanghai.