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, building up surfaces through repeated layers of colour and texture — thin and fluid in places, thick and impasto in others. Within these accumulating layers, figurative forms emerge and dissolve, drawn from family photographs, half-remembered landscapes, and the vivid palette of Suriname. His paintings do not try to restore these moments as they were; they hold what still insists on being felt, long after the moment itself has passed. Chiou's distance from Suriname is doubled — he left it himself, and comes from a family that had already been leaving somewhere else. His paintings carry both departures at once, wondering, too, what earlier generations had to leave behind, and what they wished they could have brought with them.
In recent years, Hu has expanded her practice into oil painting and ceramics while continuing her work in drawing. Her paintings build slowly, in muted, layered tones, where the female figure surfaces less as portrait than as vessel — rendered with a quiet, deliberate restraint that keeps her at a certain distance from the viewer, as though the paint itself were reluctant to fully resolve her. This exhibition focuses on her work in oil, bringing together new paintings with works first shown at Art Busan in May. Across these images, a body 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.
