Tja Ling Hu, Anthony Chiou: The Worlds We Carry
FORTHCOMING exhibition
Overview
OPENING RECEPTION :
3 October (Saturday) | 4.00 PM
To cross an ocean is to live in two timelines at once. Even at the moment of arrival, half the body remains behind, in the place left behind. This exhibition brings together two artists who, in different ways, work with that remaining half.
Their starting points differ geographically, and in their relationship to migration itself. Anthony Chiou was born and raised in Suriname before crossing the ocean to reach the Netherlands. Tja Ling Hu was born in the Netherlands; what she inherited was not a place, but a story. Her parents fled China in the 1970s, a journey never fully passed on to her. She has visited China only twice - once at three, once at sixteen - two brief, disconnected encounters with a country that remains, for her, more narrative than ground.
Chiou works in richly saturated oils, drawing on the vivid colours of Suriname, family albums, and childhood landscapes. Within fields of colour and textured surfaces, figurative forms emerge and dissolve. His paintings hold the traces of a place lived and remembered without attempting to restore it as it was. This hybridity is formal as much as biographical: a Surinamese sensibility for colour and light, worked through a painting tradition, each unsettling the other just enough to keep the surface alive.
In recent years, Hu has expanded her practice into oil painting and ceramics while continuing her work in drawing. Across these mediums, she explores a longstanding inquiry into memory, inheritance, and solidarity among women. This exhibition focuses on her work in oil, bringing together new paintings with works first shown at Art Busan in May. The female figure recurs throughout her work, less as a portrait than as a vessel: a body that holds a history it did not live, carries it alongside other women, and passes it forward. Hu paints identity as something unfixed - shaped by silence, inherited narratives, and stories that arrive secondhand.
Neither artist reproduces home as it was. They remake it through the images, bodies, and memories that remain. The two shores do not fully meet. On the sea between them, two worlds quietly overlap.
