Wong Chuk Hang Tang Contemporary | Decade One: Chronolect

Description

Tang Contemporary Art is proud to announce to celebrate the tenth anniversary of our Hong Kong space, we are presenting a large-scale group exhibition "Decade One: Chronolect" from December 18, 2025, to January 31, 2026, at both of our Central and Wong Chuk Hang spaces. The exhibition's title, "Chronolect" – a lexicon of time – captures the distinct artistic language developed over this inaugural decade. The exhibition aims to focus on the most precious gains in artistic practice—namely, "accumulation and growth"—connecting the iterative evolution of the artists' works, the gallery's and collectors' explorations within the industry, and the unwavering adherence to their original aspirations.

Since taking root in Central in 2015, the space has borne the academic accumulation of nearly 100 exhibitions, becoming a vital bridge connecting Chinese contemporary art with global dialogue. The second Hong Kong space was established in Wong Chuk Hang in 2023, focusing primarily on pan-international projects with young artists, interspersed with group and solo exhibitions featuring artists from Europe, America, Southeast Asia, and Japan.

This "Decade One: Chronolect" exhibition stands as a milestone connecting past and future. In the Wong Chuk Hang space, showcases seven voices of international resonance including, Etsu Egami dissolving language into prismatic veils of misheard faces, Hao Zecheng exhaling blurred photographs until streetlamps ignite as silent fireworks, Yoon Hyup letting the city improvise through his wrist in endless vibrating lines, Kitti Narod suspending strangers and animals in the soft gravity of kindness, Jade Ching-yuk Ng painting the trembling half-inch of air between almost-touching bodies, Nishi Yukari staging a borrowed American dream inside faceless Japanese dolls, and Meguru Yamaguchi assassinating the rectangle to set the brushstroke free converge across continents, generations, and media to sketch the living ecosystem of contemporary painting. Alexander Skats reframes digital imagery into a vibrant critique of consumption, beckoning viewers to reevaluate beauty in the modern world, while August Vilella’s surreal intuitions craft dreamlike narratives with whimsical characters that invite introspection through their expressive gazes. Yu Xuan juxtaposes the charm and monotony of contemporary life, layering animal imagery over designed objects to form a strange aesthetic that mirrors society’s complexities. Their juxtaposition gives visible form to the “Chronolect”: a private dialect of time forged across one decade of restless practice. This is not a retrospective, but a single shared breath; ten irreconcilable tongues speaking the same urgent future, reflecting the pulse of contemporary art from Hong Kong to the world and heralding, in trembling pigment, the shape of the decade yet to come.

Etsu Egami wields the brush like a hesitant translator, her oils bleeding into prismatic veils that drape the human form in ambiguity. Broad, translucent strokes—dripping and deliberate—cascade across vast canvases, favoring the deep, conflicted lineage of oil over acrylic's shallow gloss. As an Asian heir to Western pigment, she revels in its history of intrusion and renewal, layering blues, pinks, purples, and golds to fracture faces into swirling distortions, evoking Francis Bacon's tormented whirl yet softened by Gutai's raw gesture and Japanese caricature's sly economy.

Hao Zecheng does not paint landscapes; he exhales them from the haze of half-remembered photographs. He begins with a snapshot (blurry, overexposed, forgotten on a phone), then lets it rot and bloom on the canvas. Memory is his solvent. Time loosens, space folds, a streetlamp ignites into silent fireworks, a branch twists into sudden calligraphy, a mountain ridge hardens into an ancient stele. What was once ordinary slips its skin and drifts into a dream. In his world, fidelity is a betrayal. The truest image is the one that escapes, carrying the faint perfume of a moment that never quite happened the way you thought it did.

Yoon Hyup paints the way a jazz solo moves: no beginning, no end, just pulse. From a New York rooftop or a Seoul alley wall, he lets the city’s heartbeat flood his arm. Lines (thin, thick, trembling, sure) spill like drum brushes across the snare; dots scatter like hi-hats in the night. Every mark is improvised, yet nothing feels accidental. The canvas becomes a turntable, spinning rhythms you can almost hear. He doesn’t depict the city. He lets the city paint through him, one vibrating line at a time.

Kitti Narod paints the world as it could be if kindness were gravity. In his canvases, strangers share the same soft light, dogs and children occupy the same plane of importance, and every color leans toward warmth (peach, butter, rose, the hushed gold of late afternoon). Figures are rounded, almost weightless, as though tenderness has lifted them an inch above the ground. A grandmother’s hand rests on a teenager’s shoulder; a street vendor laughs with a passerby; a cat sleeps across two laps that belong to people who, in another life, might never speak. Nothing is forced, yet everything belongs.

Jade Ching-yuk Ng does not paint bodies; she paints the trembling air between them. Her surfaces (canvas, wood relief, cut-out paper, etched copper) are quiet autopsies of touch. A hand almost reaches another hand, a cheek grazes a shoulder that is no longer there, a mouth opens as if to speak into skin that has already turned into memory. Everything is soft, almost bruised with tenderness, yet nothing ever quite connects. The gap itself becomes the subject: that half-inch of charged absence where intimacy and loneliness share the same breath. She works like an alchemist in reverse. Classical myths, religious icons, anatomical plates, modernist façades (all are fed into her private crucible, melted, and poured back out as ambiguous symbols that refuse their original names).

Nishi Yukari paints a borrowed American dream that Japan never lived. Perfect pastel kitchens, endless suburbs, golden-hour diners; yet every face is blank, every figure a plush toy or lifeless doll occupying spaces too idyllic to trust. Beneath the candy-colored light lurks neo-noir shadow, a quiet paranoia. These are postwar Japan’s imported memories: Hollywood reruns and Sears catalogs grafted onto a culture still smoking from the bombs. Nishi’s faceless citizens are what remains when identity is replaced by advertisement. In their eerie stillness, she asks: What happens to a self when its nostalgia is manufactured overseas?

Meguru Yamaguchi landed in Brooklyn in 2007, carrying Tokyo’s raw 90s street pulse in his wrist. He declared war on the rectangle. Canvas, with its polite corners and obedient edges, was quietly murdered. In its place, he births wild, uncontainable strokes (thick, glistening arcs of oil that leap off the wall like living graffiti, curling into space, defying gravity, refusing to be framed). Each piece in his OUT OF BOUNDS series is a single liberated gesture made flesh: paint-skinned, sculpted, and set free. These are not paintings; they are events. A crimson whip cracks mid-air, a cobalt slash knots itself into a fist, a black torrent freezes just before it spills onto your shoes. The brushstroke, painting’s oldest citizen, is finally allowed to grow up, run away, and become architecture.

Alexander Skats transforms digital imagery into a kaleidoscope of intrigue, employing a vibrant palette that invites viewers to question the beauty in everyday consumption. His works, merging oil painting with digital influences, challenge perceptions as cinematic frames unfold across the canvas, blurring the line between nostalgia and modernity.

August Vilella channels his subconscious through a “surreal-intuitive” method, crafting oil paintings that immerse audiences in dreamlike realms. His characters, with their large, sparkling eyes, beckon viewers to engage with the emotional depths of each scene, balancing refined brushwork and whimsical forms.

Yu Xuan juxtaposes the banal and the beautiful, using animals embedded within urban typography to explore contemporary life’s intricacies. His layered compositions provoke reflection on social landscapes, where artificial objects meet evocative animal imagery, each hint weaving complexity into the visual narrative.