Graduation Show 2025: Emerging Asian Graduates

Opening Reception |  30 August (Saturday), 4.00 - 6.30 pm

Namuso Gallery is pleased to present Graduation Show 2025: Emerging Asian Graduates, featuring six recently graduated women artists of Asian background who are currently developing their practices in the Netherlands. Through painting, installation, and photography, the artists move fluidly between the personal and the universal, drawing from lived experience to pose broader questions about perception, identity, and the search for belonging.

Though working in different mediums and languages, the artists seem to move in quiet parallel, each drawn to what is fragmented, fleeting, or easily overlooked. Scattered memories, broken narratives, and subtle traces become points of departure through which they attempt to repair, reconnect, or make sense of what feels disjointed. Their shared attentiveness expresses a desire not only to reflect on disconnection, but also to restore wholeness, however provisional, whether with the self, with others, or with the shifting surroundings they inhabit.

Bo Zhang’s pastel-toned paintings drift between lightness and unease, playful on the surface yet quietly unsettled beneath. Her works feel like fleeting fantasies of everyday life, capturing the strange, in-between space where reality slips into dream. Tian Teng begins with photographs of ephemeral moments tied to memory, carefully translating these images into paint as a way toslow down time and hold onto passing impressions. Following a similar impulse,  Choi Wong stitches together fragments of images using thread, gently piecing back what has faded. Her work reflects on how we hold onto what slips away, tracing the bizarreinterplay between presence and absence.

Yingtong Zhou uses drawing and performance to explore the unspoken, fragile spaces between people. Her practice—shaped in part by her move to the Netherlands and the feelings of displacement and hindered communication that accompanied it—reflects on how we see each other, and what it means to be truly seen. In response to similar inner turmoil, Yewon Cho’s calm and attentive focus on small, often overlooked details—like cracks and quiet surface patterns—becomes a way to find balance amid the disorientation of unfamiliar environments. Similarly, building on this intimate attention to what is easily forgotten, Bohyeon Hwang investigates our relationship with the objects that surround us. Her layered paintings evoke the emotional resonance of things neglected, tracing how presence might persist even in what seems lost or cast aside.

These artists are at a formative stage in their careers, yet their practices already demonstrate thoughtful engagement with material, concept, and context. Collectively, their work addresses pressing topics central to much contemporary art today—such as fragmentation, repair, and the recovery of connection amid experiences of displacement and cultural transition—through distinct visual languages and sustained, thoughtful inquiry.

This exhibition marks the inaugural edition of Namuso Gallery’s annual initiative to support emerging Asian artists trained in the Netherlands, as part of our broader commitment to fostering dialogue between the art scenes of Asia and Europe.

Featured artists: 

click to learn more about each artist and explore available works

Bo Zhang | Gerrit Rietveld Academie

Bohyeon Hwang | Frank Mohr Institute

Choi Wong | Royal Academy of Art (KABK)

Tian Teng | Royal Academy of Art, London

Yewon Cho | Academie Minerva

Yingtong Zhou | HKU, Utrecht