A Grass Roof at MASSIMODECARLO Hong Kong
Have you ever looked at a painting and felt yourself slow down? In the middle of Hong Kong’s dense vertical rhythm, Lily Stockman’s A Grass Roof at MASSIMODECARLO Hong Kong offers a rare kind of quiet. The exhibition feels like stepping into a shelter: small, temporary, fragile, but open to everything around it. The title comes from the 8th-century Zen poem Song of the Grass Roof Hermitage by Shitou Xiqian. Like the poem, Stockman’s new oil paintings hold a gentle contradiction. They feel intimate, almost enclosed, yet they seem to carry whole landscapes inside them. For this body of work, Stockman turns away from rigid tools and uses fine badger and horsehair brushes, traditionally associated with Chinese calligraphy. You can feel that change in the lines. They are soft, trembling, and alive with pressure. Each mark seems to record the movement of the hand. The paintings do not describe landscape in a literal way. Instead, they suggest atmosphere: celadon green, moss, pale blue, mist, air. Forms appear, fade, and return. Perspective loosens. The boundary between inside and outside becomes porous. What makes A Grass Roof so compelling is the way different traditions quietly meet. There are echoes of American abstraction, Chinese literati painting, Buddhist thought, and natural landscape, but the work never feels heavy or over-explained. In Cold Mountain (2026), floating green forms sit within washed blues, bringing to mind both calligraphic abstraction and classical Chinese mountain painting. In Meadowlark, a sharp orange shape glows inside pale green space, inspired by the sound frequencies of the Western Meadowlark’s song. Here, sound becomes colour. Space becomes breath. Stockman’s research reaches from the Mogao caves of Dunhuang to historic European encounters with Chinese gardens, but the paintings remain light and open. They feel less like studies and more like invitations. As the artist puts it, each canvas is “a window left open so that the room might…