In his first solo exhibition in Europe, Cheung Tsz Hin unveils a new body of work that traces the fragile topography of emotion—how memories mutate, fracture, and reassemble over time. In starlight beneath the wavy leaves, the exhibition unfolds as a constellation of shifting sensations: longing, dislocation, tenderness, and the quiet ache of impermanence. What materializes are dreamlike environments suspended between the familiar and the spectral, where recollection and perception blur like light refracted through water—echoing the instability of remembrance itself.
“I’ve been thinking about the continuous process of shifting, twisting, and questioning in emotions that captivates me,” Cheung reflects. “Emotions evoked by memories or encounters are fragile and fragmented. Over time, they’re fabricated, reconstructed, and sometimes inverted.”
Cheung’s paintings often emerge without sketches or references, beginning instead from thin veils of oil that evolve intuitively. The process becomes an excavation of the subconscious—layers of color are rubbed, scraped, and washed, as if the artist were uncovering an image hidden beneath the surface of the mind. What materializes are dreamlike environments suspended between the familiar and the spectral, hovering at the edge of recollection, where certainty dissolves into haze.
The monumental flow of void, 2025, measuring two by four meters, anchors the exhibition. A seated figure, viewed from behind in a gesture reminiscent of the Rückenfigur of Romantic painting, gazes toward a fractured interior. Books scatter around her feet, pages dissolving into pools of ochre and rose. At the canvas’s edge, the image seems to peel away—memory unspooling, slipping beyond grasp. To the right, a sequence of box-like forms evoke flickering television screens gone static: symbols of disconnection and the uncanny silence that follows the end of transmission. The composition—at once intimate and disorienting—mirrors the oscillation between presence and absence that defines much of Cheung’s work.
In between slumbers, the artist turns inward, capturing the liminal state between wakefulness and sleep. Lemon yellows, burnt oranges, and umber tones coalesce into a scene that feels both domestic and hallucinatory—a draped fabric, perhaps a tent or cocoon, illuminated by an internal glow. “It explores the space between reality and dreams,” he notes, recalling a period of insomnia when perception sharpened into something at once hyperreal and surreal. The chromatic warmth suggests a state of suspension: the heightened clarity that comes from sleeplessness, when thoughts drift and fuse like colors on wet linen.
In the exhibition, each painting becomes a vessel for transformation: an emotion perceived, reimagined, and re-experienced through paint. As Cheung observes, “Different minds will find different meanings and connections within the paintings. This openness to individual interpretation is something I find very interesting—it invites diversity.”
In starlight beneath the wavy leaves, memory is not a static archive but a living current, where loss and illumination coexist. The paintings shimmer with the residue of what has passed, capturing the delicate balance between holding on and letting go—the brief gleam of a sunbeam, lent to us too briefly.
