Exhibition · Contemporary by Angela Li · Hong Kong
"Soma", a group exhibition that brings together four artists working at the intersection of mind, body, and time; not as separate categories, but as a single, indivisible soma. In ancient Greek, soma simply meant "body." But in the traditions of somatic practice, from dance to phenomenology, and to Eastern ritual, soma refers to something more precise: the body as felt from within, not the body as seen from outside. It is the body that breathes, aches, remembers, and trembles. It is the body that is the mind, and the mind that inhabits the body. Gordon Chi captures time itself, not as a number on a clock, but as a slow, invisible transfer. Time moves from the body of the maker to the body of the object. His practice is an act of listening to what philosophers call the ‘extended soma’: the understanding that our inner body does not stop at the skin. We leak into the world. We leave traces of our breathing on everything we touch. And objects, patiently hold onto us. Cynthia Kwok repeats the human form until something surfaces from beneath the surface. Memories of alienation rendered repeatedly until they take on flesh. Her figures emerge when the weight of the world presses on a body until it becomes unrecognizable. And yet—it breathes. Still stubbornly alive. Kwok shows us that to be pressed into a new shape is not the same as being erased. Claire Lee paints and builds in the space where vulnerability becomes strength, not by conquering fragility, but by learning to breathe inside it. Her surfaces bear the marks of touch, pressure, and narrow escape; reminding us that a living body is never smooth. Lee is telling us that breaking is not the end of the story. Falling and rising, she shows us, are the same motion, seen from different angles. Alyssa Tang strives for affect—that electric, pre-verbal current that passes between bodies before thought arrives. Her figures are not portraits. They are events. To look at her work is not to analyze; it is to feel, and to…